Lela Rose finally gets her boots
While some girls dream of getting their first designer handbag, Lela Rose—who grew up in Dallas—dreamt of getting her own pair of boots from Lucchese, the legendary luxury bootmaker founded in 1883 in San Antonio. When she got married, her whole family got fitted in Lucchese boots, blending their formal wear with a nod to their Texas roots.
Nearly three decades later, Rose is not just wearing the brand—she’s designing for it. Rose’s eponymous clothing label, which she launched in 1998, and Lucchese, the 143-year-old bootmaker, will launch a collaboration on March 10. It’s a partnership that makes sense: two brands with deep Texas roots finally finding each other.
The collection comprises three boots, each bearing Rose’s signature blend of femininity and Western romanticism. The standout is a white boot adorned with a sculptural 3D flower and intricate quilted stitching, which is already creating a stir among brides. The partnership goes beyond footwear: Rose’s team has developed an accompanying clothing line that connects directly to the boots, and both brands will cross-sell in their respective stores. (Boots start at $1,295, and clothes start at $650.)
The Cowboy Look Is Here to Stay
Rose has always wanted to design boots, but she acknowledges that her team didn’t have the skills to make them at the level of craftsmanship she wanted. So she was thrilled when Lucchese was interested in working together. “We are not experts in footwear,” she says. “This was such a great opportunity to partner with someone who completely knows quality and fit, and then we could bring our design aesthetic to that, and vice versa with clothing.”
The collaboration feels timely. Historically, Western style has entered the fashion cycle every decade or so, with brands incorporating cowboy boots and shirts into their collections. But over the last several years, something has changed. The Western look has become embedded within the American aesthetic, alongside the preppy look and sportswear.
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour sent Stetsons and fringe flying off shelves. Louis Vuitton staged a Western-inspired runway show featuring real cowboys. Boot brands like Tecovas and Miron Crosby are growing with remarkable speed. And the customer base has shifted—it’s no longer just Texans and ranchers, but New Yorkers, Angelenos, and Bostonians who are wearing boots year-round. The cowboy boot is beginning to be thought of more like a loafer—a wardrobe staple that transcends region and occasion.
Lela Rose Has Always Loved Western Style
Rose launched her brand in 1998, creating clothes that appealed to her: dresses for a busy social calendar of parties and events that stand out for their sculptural silhouettes, colorful prints, and unapologetic femininity. (Her pieces are at a luxury price point, with dresses that easily hit $3,000 or $4,000, and tops that start at $400.)
For Rose, this focus on ranch style isn’t a pivot. Eighteen years ago, she developed a collection of Western-influenced pieces—bead shirts, intricate Western-chic separates—and tried to sell them to Neiman Marcus, Saks, and Bergdorf Goodman. “They all just looked at us like, ‘what?’” she recalls.
The timing was wrong, and the collection was quietly shelved, though she loved the shirt so much that she kept it in her permanent collection. When Rose moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, five years ago, she decided it was time to pursue her longtime dream of launching a Western line, called Lela Rose Ranch. She’s opened a shop in Jackson Hole that’s built around her personal vision of Western chic and stocked with vintage Navajo silver, one-of-a-kind pieces sourced from her own travels, and clothing designed entirely according to her instincts. The Ranch collection is now being integrated into the main Lela Rose line.
Rose started her namesake label at a time when the only way to be relevant in fashion was to have a rack at Neiman Marcus and a runway show at New York Fashion Week. She did both. One year, the theme was “The Roseminster Dog Show,” a tongue-in-cheek riff on the Westminster Dog Show. “I look back on some of our shows as some of my favorite things that we’ve ever done,” she says. “We’re always trying to entertain you as much as show you the clothing.”
But the industry Rose launched into no longer exists. The wholesale model and department stores have been disrupted by e-commerce, then disrupted again by social media, then disrupted yet again by a pandemic. These changes scrambled every assumption about how and where people shop. Rose has navigated all of this without outside investors, bootstrapping from a studio with one seamstress to a brand with three retail stores and two more locations opening this year.
Over the last 25 years, she’s cultivated a well-heeled, well-traveled customer—a woman with a full social calendar who jets frequently from fundraisers in big cities to more rural locations like Jackson Hole and Aspen, Colorado. Her collections are designed to help these women look appropriate as they navigate across these different situations.
That customer, Rose believes, is exactly the person who has been waiting for this Western moment. The pieces she has designed aren’t supposed to look like a costume from a spaghetti Western, but a nod to the outdoors and the heritage of cowboy style. “It’s not like I’m putting on a holster and wearing chaps every day,” she says. “I love this aesthetic, but I want to weave it seamlessly into the rest of my wardrobe.”
A denim skirt, she argues, can be worn with a concho belt in Aspen or with heels in New York or with tennis shoes in Paris. The West, in other words, is not a destination anymore. It’s an aesthetic vocabulary, one that Lela Rose has been speaking her whole life.