Okay so my roommate walked into the kitchen wearing my Justin ropers last week. Like the actual brown ones. Not ropers she bought that are similar. Mine. And started making coffee without acknowledging that what she was wearing were mine. I looked at her for about ten seconds flat.
She looked back at me and said “what, they were by the door.” End of conversation. And I realized that I didn’t have anything to say because it actually made sense. They looked fine. Good, even.
They looked good on her. Which broke my little world a little bit, because I’ve absolutely sat in a comment section typing out “get boots made for your foot shape!” like I know what I’m talking about one thousand times.
So let’s not belabor the question too much, because again the internet likes to complicate stuff that doesn’t need to be complicated. Can women wear mens cowboy boots? Of course they can. I say that as someone whose job literally is having opinions about menswear for money and I couldn’t care less what “side” of the store you grab them from. The entire gendered dividing line in Western boots especially is literally invented after the fact most of the time. Boots weren’t designed with some hyper masculine silhouette in mind like, say, a suit jacket kind of was, they were designed to work with a stirrup and put your foot at a certain angle, function over form, and then “mens” and ” womens” became two different things down the line as a marketing strategy, narrow toes, tall shafts, maybe just the same last but with a smaller range of sizes offered. It’s not sacred. None of this is.
So let’s talk about the actual question at hand, because “yeah they can wear them” doesn’t really help you if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
The Fit
Men’s and women’s boots fit differently. Most of them are on different lasts, and the size number you think you’re wearing isn’t always going to convert evenly between the two. If you’re used to wearing women’s size 8 boots ladies, you don’t just put on a men’s size 8 and magically they work. It’s about an inch and a half to two whole sizes smaller going men’s, so more like a men’s 6 to 6.5 depending on who makes them and that small variance matters. Brands fit differently across the board but pay extra attention in boot sales because it’s crazy important here. I would say Ariat and Justin are about sizing since they both come out of texas, but compare them to something like Tecovas and neither of them agree with each other on size so just use that half size reduction as a starting point instead of an absolute.
The fit of the boot itself, once you’re in the right size range, is mostly going to come into play at the instep and calf. Men’s boots have on average more room in the shaft of the boot for your calf, and that’s where the real womens to mens troubleshooting happens, not in the length. I was told by a bootmaker at a storefront in Nashville that the toe can tell you if the size is right, but the calf is what tells you if the boot fits. If you have a narrow calf as many women do you can get the length perfect but still end up with boots that look huge on your leg when you wear them because they were too big in the calf. That isn’t a women wearing mens boot problem, that’s simply a women wearing boots that don’t fit her weirdness just like plenty of men have the exact same issue except reversed.
The toe shape is the other place where you’ll notice a big difference between men’s and womens boots. Men’s boots are almost always going to be that skinny snip toe or classic pointed shape while women’s boots in the last few years have jumped on the square toe or round toe shape to better align with the Western revival we’ve been seeing run wild on TikTok since 2022 started. So sometimes women aren’t even going into the store looking for a “mens boot” they’re looking for a certain shape that may be easier to find in the mens department that season. Gender bent? Sure. Impossible to trace back? Also true.
But that doesn’t make it an issue of one gender shopping in the other’s section, it’s just supply and demand.
At the rodeo, nobody cares if your boots were labeled “men” or “women”
Let me get real about my own bullshit, because someone needs to say this. For a long time I thought that because you could find men’s boots used more easily they were “the real versions” and women’s boots were somehow watered down, softer leather, cheaper construction, blah blah blah, all crap I believed up until I actually started asking questions about it just because every single pair of vintage boots I came across were men’s sized at my local thrift stores in Atlanta. Thinking my opinion was correct because of what I saw was called survivorship bias, not realizing plenty of women’s boots are made on the exact same lines with the exact same materials as the “mens” pair just cut on a different last to fit women better. They put them in different boxes so they can mark them up separately but other than that they’re the exact same thing.
All of that matters about as much as the gender written on the boot itself when you’re asking yourself should you wear them or not. The three things that have always mattered are the fit through your foot and calf (no one cares about length as much as you think they will honestly), the leather and sole quality being suitable for whatever you’ll actually be doing in them (walking around Tulsa isn’t the same as cattle ranching across both of those factors) and if you like how they look on you. Period. I texted a picture of my roommate in my boots to our group chat to be salty and my friend sent back “those look better on her than they did on you” which yes is rude but also true and I’ll be over here remembering that no one watching somebody put on a cowboy boot is doing a gender check before they decide if they like how it looks.
Yes, women can wear men’s cowboy boots. Wear what fits and if you like how they look wear them some more.
Jamie is in his early twenties, lives in Manchester and makes menswear content for a living. He writes about whatever’s actually trending this week, fast and a bit chaotic, and he’ll happily tell you when he got it wrong.
