If you consider Texas and cowboys, what do you envision? Boots, hats, and dusty trails? One North Texas man is giving classic Western attire a modern spin, combining his family’s deep ranching roots with big-city flair.
His name is D. Rich. And his bold, one-of-a-kind outfits are turning heads and altering attitudes.
He and his friends wore pink in coordination, bringing a burst of color to the Cowboys of Color event at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo.
“I want you to look at these boots,” D. Rich said with pride. “It’s just a reflection of who I am, from the hat to the glasses to the boots.”.
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A star barber and Western wear designer, D. Wealthy’s flair for fashion caught the attention of Jim Austin, the co-founder of the Nationwide Multicultural Western Heritage Museum.
“He’s promoting Western culture to minorities,” Austin said.
Austin wants the public to be aware of the multicultural groups that helped settle the West.
The forgotten cowboys’ historical past,” Austin explains. “Most people aren’t aware that one-fourth of cowboys had been Black, Hispanic, and Native American.”
Austin brought D. Wealthy as his guest to the rodeo event.
“Well, D. Wealthy is a legend in his own world, making them aware that it’s world-class to dress up and be part of Western history,” Austin said.
Yet it’s more than certain events; Western GQ is D. Wealthy’s daily fashion. At his barbershop, everything, floor to ceiling, tells a part of his story.
“I grew up in the city as a child,” he said. “But my dad was raised in Malakoff, Texas.
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The ranch has been in the family for over 250 years, and every year they keep up traditions like cow-hiding, taking good care of horses, and baling hay.
“Once I got older, cowboy hats and boots had been all about country living—the mud, the smell, the filthy boots,” he said. “But for me, because I was fashion-forward, I said, ‘Hey, I’m going to take my stylish fashion and mix it with Western fashion.’ That’s what I like to call Western GQ.”
From making up an outfit to doing up friends, D. Wealthy said his clothes get people talking.
“This can be a lightning historical past lesson,” he said. “The origin of the name ‘cowboy’ goes back to the slave days when homeowners would say to the boys, ‘Go get the cows—go get that cowboy.’ And so they can go and corral the cows.”
That’s how they earned the name ‘cowboys.’ They enjoyed it,” he said. “When people say, ‘That ain’t for us, it’s for them,’ I give them a heritage message to allow them to know, it’s Okay. Several of our elders and ancestors were raised on farms. That’s the way we’d been raised. Today, you can take that same kind and magnify it.”.
Above all, he wishes to encourage others to love their past and be themselves.
“Like I tell folks, it’s about your own personal character,” he said. “Because of all people has their own kind of uniqueness. I just want all people to be their own kind of beautiful.”
In the future, D. Wealthy will be taking Western put on trend shows to North Texas. He also segments people for fundraisers and speaks about his adventures with incredible Texans on his Western GQ YouTube channel.
