How French Women Are Wearing Cowboy Boots This Winter
Eugénie Trochu is a Who What Wear editor in residence known for her transformative work at Vogue France and her Substack newsletter, where she documents and shares new trends, her no-nonsense approach to fashion and style, plus other musings. She's also working on her upcoming first book that explores fashion as a space of memory, projection, and reinvention.
Forget the rodeo.
In America, they're cowboy boots. In France, we call them santiags, a word that exists nowhere else and that says a lot about how we see them. We renamed them before we even put them on. Cowboy boots never reached Paris straight from the ranch: They came by way of Johnny Hallyday, France's answer to Elvis, and the leather-jacket rock scene of the '70s before ending up on the feet of women in the 6th arrondissement. In France, the santiag was a rocker's boot long before it was a cowboy's, which may explain why we've never managed to wear it literally.
They come back every winter, and this season more insistently than usual: at Chloé, Celine, and Khaite, with the American West running through Nili Lotan and Jil Sander too. Nothing new for Paris Texas, who turned Americana into a religion, or for Isabel Marant, who made the boot a uniform for her slightly rock 'n' roll girls. What has changed is the mood. Between Yellowstone, Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter, and Bella Hadid trading red carpets for rodeos, the Wild West is a full-blown cultural fantasy again. But a Frenchwoman only ever takes one piece of it.
The rule: boots, nothing else
I wear mine with long straight-leg trousers, a dark blue menswear blazer, sometimes a crisp white shirt. No hat, no fringe, no head-to-toe denim. A cowboy boot works like a quote: Add too much around it, and it turns into a costume. It needs a sensible outfit to look a little rebellious. Think Jane Birkin dressed for a Nashville honky-tonk.
It's all in the toe
Shape matters more than anything. I want a slightly pointed toe that doesn't curl up. The upturned toe was designed for a stirrup, not for the hem of a tailored trouser, which just catches on it. I look for a long line, leather that looks like it's already lived a little, a heel I can manage on the subway stairs, and stitching subtle enough that no one asks when the tour starts.
My pick this season
I've fallen for the Arizona Love x Harpo collaboration, which I got to see at a dinner in Paris before its release. The toe is rounder than what I usually buy, and that's exactly what won me over: The boot keeps its stitching, its heel, its real santiag attitude, but loses its edge. It's a cowboy boot that can go to the office.
Which brings us back to the word. Frenchwomen didn't adopt the cowboy boot. They invented the santiag: Take away the horse, the hat, and Texas, and keep only the attitude.
