The Best Cowboy Boots for Cosplaying City Slickers
He says that good cowboy boots should be made with natural leathers that age well with wear, mould to the wearer’s feet, and can be recrafted repeatedly. His non-negotiables include full leather construction from the insole to the outsole, linings, uppers, and heels. Look for Goodyear welted construction which will allow you to have the boots resoled and extend their life. The toe bug (the fancy stitching at the toe), should sit right where your foot flexes to help cover up the crease that comes with each step. Preferably, this would be corded by hand, of course.
Price points will vary, and you can get some well-made boots for around $300. The really great stuff will often be twice that much. Middleton says, “the best thing to do is wait and save up until you can buy the version you actually want because its impossible to cut corners and still deliver the product you want.” So if you can be patient, save up. If you can’t, try buying secondhand. But if you simply can’t wait, you’ll do well enough with plenty of the mid-tier brands until you’re ready to upgrade.
How We Test and Review Products
Style is subjective, we know—that’s the fun of it. But we’re serious about helping our audience get dressed. Whether it’s the best white sneakers, the flyest affordable suits, or the need-to-know menswear drops of the week, GQ Recommends’ perspective is built on years of hands-on experience, an insider awareness of what’s in and what’s next, and a mission to find the best version of everything out there, at every price point.
Our staffers aren’t able to try on every single piece of clothing you read about on GQ.com (fashion moves fast these days), but we have an intimate knowledge of each brand’s strengths and know the hallmarks of quality clothing—from materials and sourcing, to craftsmanship, to sustainability efforts that aren’t just greenwashing. GQ Recommends heavily emphasizes our own editorial experience with those brands, how they make their clothes, and how those clothes have been reviewed by customers. Bottom line: GQ wouldn’t tell you to wear it if we wouldn’t.
How We Make These Picks
We make every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the best options across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.
To kick off the process, we enlist the GQ Recommends braintrust to vote on our contenders. Some of the folks involved have worked in retail, slinging clothes to the masses; others have toiled for small-batch menswear labels; all spend way too much time thinking about what hangs in their closets.
We lean on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrow down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.
Across the majority of our buying guides, our team boasts firsthand experience with the bulk of our selects, but a handful are totally new to us. So after several months of intense debate, we tally the votes, collate the anecdotal evidence, and emerge with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best of the category right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs.
Whatever your preferences, whatever your style, there’s bound to be a superlative version on this list for you.
