As the dust settles on last season’s trends, one that shows no signs of slowing down is the western, cowboy-shaped yee-haw agenda. You could see it last weekend at London fashion week men’s in the form of Martine Rose’s thigh-high cowboy boots on the runway, and the celebrity stylist Luke Day dressed in a Stetson and Brokeback shearling jacket. While at the Golden Globes Nick Jonas won the red carpet by wearing a western-cut Prada suit complete with bolo tie. But what is it about yee-haw that is endlessly appealing?

Nick Jonas at the Golden Globes in Prada. Photograph: Daniele Venturelli/WireImage

On the one hand, the cowboy is a classic masculine archetype that fashion is able to appropriate, deconstruct and then reconstruct with a knowing wink. “Yee-haw couture”, as Kacey Musgraves calls it, could be seen in Gucci’s Stetson, and souped-up denim jackets from the likes of Christopher Kane, Louis Vuitton and Versace. These same ideas of camp fluidity are certainly what Post Malone and Diplo have been joyfully playing with on Instagram and on the red carpet.

Cowboy boots at the Martine Rose show. Photograph: Eamonn McCormack/BFC/Getty Images

LaQuan Smith X Jordache collection Photograph: Fernanda Calfat/Getty Images for NYFW: The Shows

But unlike similarly archetypical trends which have come before it like the fisherman, the soldier and the woodsman (or lumbersexual), yee-haw has a deeply political bent. At its root it is a rejection of everything the cowboy had come to represent in culture: white, male, cisgender and colonial. Queer-friendly designers like Telfar and LaQuan Smith appropriated the cowboy image in their collections and, in the process, made it “other”, with a capital O. “The word ‘country’ is a pretty straightforward (one) to design around,” Telfar’s creative director Babak Radboy told Dazed & Confused magazine about their autumn-winter 19 collection. “We’re interested in how this word has two different meanings that fight against each other.”

The fight around “country” was played through Lil Nas X. The gay, black TikTok star, who started a culture war when his trap-influenced song Old Town Road, was removed from the Billboard country chart for not being country enough. Which for many read as: “too black”. But in fact, part of yee-haw’s deconstruction of the cowboy archetype was the reveal that some historical “truths” were not true after all.

“A quarter of the cowboys in the 1800s were black,” Bri Malandro, creator of the “yee-haw agenda” term says. “It’s discouraging that Hollywood painted the picture they did in the 50s and 60s.” Does she think that the yee-haw moment is a reaction to Trump’s US? “In some ways yes,” she says. “I’m not too political, but since Trump has been in office he’s caused so much separation. I think it’s turned into a moment where more black people are prideful of how they have influenced this culture in ways that were erased before.” Yee-haw is a recalibration of fashion that’s cheering for both its style but also its underlying meaning. We’re gonna ride it ’till we can’t no more.