Jon Voight as Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Vitals
Jon Voight as Joe Buck, naïve Texan wannabe gigolo and Army veteran
New York City, Summer through Winter 1968
Film: Midnight Cowboy
Release Date: May 25, 1969
Director: John Schlesinger
Costume Designer: Ann Roth
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
Harry Nilsson recorded his cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin'” 57 years ago this week on November 13, 1967. This Grammy-winning folk hit has since become inextricably linked with the 1969 drama Midnight Cowboy—which celebrated its 55th anniversary in May—after director John Schlesinger chose it as the film’s theme song.
Adapted by Waldo Salt from James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel of the same name, Midnight Cowboy received a controversial if critically acclaimed response upon its release. Six months earlier, the MPAA implemented its voluntary rating system to classify age suitability for major releases, replacing the increasingly outdated “Hays Code” that had been enforced since the early 1930s. Midnight Cowboy was one of the first mainstream movies to be rated “X”, which forbade any audience members under age 17 to be admitted and was reserved for movies demonstrating the most extreme sexual themes, graphic violence or language. Despite the stigma of this dramatically restrictive rating, Midnight Cowboy was the third highest-grossing American movie released in 1969 and won three of the seven Oscars for which it was nominated—Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay—and it remains the only movie with an X (or equivalent NC-17) rating to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The movie begins in the small town of Big Spring, Texas, where the strapping Joe Buck (Jon Voight) quits his job as a dishwasher and brings his garish cowhide-wrapped suitcase aboard an overnight bus to New York City. His attitude and attire reflect the happy-go-lucky cowboy persona he has assumed to conceal the sexual trauma of his past—a trauma that has clearly informed his chosen vocation as “a kind of hustler” catering to older women similar in age to the grandmother who raised him in a manner presented as uncomfortably close (if not explicitly incestuous.)
Joe is initially disheartened upon his arrival in the urban jungle, where he realizes everybody’s ignorin’ rather than talkin’ at him—at least until he finds a willing lover in middle-aged Park Avenue socialite Cass (Sylvia Miles), whose age, wealth, and libido perfectly suit the type of woman he was hoping to find… though he ends up paying her a few of his scant dollars to account for the perceived insult of asking her for money after their tryst. Joe takes his few remaining dollars to a nearby bar to wash down his sorrows in a beer, where he meets the crippled and consumptive con man Enrico “Rico” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman)—or “Ratso”, to his enemies.
Following a rocky start that leaves Joe twenty dollars poorer and essentially homeless with nothing but his trusty Zenith transistor radio and the increasingly dirty clothes on his back, an unexpected partnership grows between the two hustlers—”united against the cold loneliness of the city,” as The Maltese Falconer writes. As their financial situation worsens with Rico’s health, the pair’s desperate goal for making money by any means possible grows more urgent to escape the Big Rotten Apple’s cold winter and go where the sun keeps shinin’, realizing Rico’s lifelong dream of moving to Florida.
What’d He Wear?
The opening credits detail Joe Buck donning his new cowboy garb. When he strolls into the restaurant where he used to wash dishes, his boss asks “what the hell are you doin’ in that getup?”—informing the audience that this is clearly out of character for who Joe used to be, but it aligns with how he imagines his horny New Yorker clientele picture Texan studs—an exaggeration inspired by the likes of Paul Newman’s western-wear in Hud. Though while Newman’s Hud dressed functionally for his ranch duties, Joe embraces the more flamboyant aspects of cowboy apparel.
Bro thought he was cooking.
“Heavily donned in Western wear, his style is an unwavering signifier of the nation’s prosperous ethos,” writes Faye Fearon for GQ around the film’s 50th anniversary in 2019. “Voight’s uniform is one of the few factors that keeps you rooting for the movie’s anti-hero drifter against that backdrop of darkness.”
Harrison Hill added more complex context for the same publication just two years later:
The result is a man who seems overwhelmingly adrift — and decidedly gay: If Joe’s cowboy duds looked tough and “manly” back in Texas, in Times Square they read as comically homoerotic. That Joe fails to understand this — that he thinks his brand of studliness is pure hetero gold — is part of what makes him so endearing. At one point, Ratso tries to set him straight, as it were: “That great big dumb cowboy crap of yours don’t appeal to nobody except every jockey on 42nd Street,” he yells. “That’s faggot stuff.”
The Black Cowboy Hat
Fresh out of the shower, Joe first puts on his cowboy hat—the linchpin of his new persona. This black felt hat is shaped with a low, round telescope-style crown and a dramatically curved brim. “Miller’s” is printed in gold along the black leather sweatband, suggesting its maker.
A silver-corded band around the base of the crown is secured to the body of the hat through spiraling black threads, with the excess cord knotted and left hanging on the back left side.
The Fringed Buckskin Jacket
Joe complements his cowboy hat with another distinctive icon of western apparel: a fringed buckskin jacket. This was made specifically for Jon Voight by costume designer Ann Roth who later explained to author Glenn Frankel: “I didn’t want it to be cute… I wanted it to look real and unhip.”
A buckskin jacket becomes Joe Buck‘s outer skin.
Buckskin outerwear originated among Native Americans, who would work the raw hide of a recently killed deer with its brain tissue, then expose it to wood smoke for hours to craft a golden honey-tinted leather that was both pliable and durable. Like many other Native American innovations, buckskin gear was soon appropriated by cowboys and western settlers—twisting the sartorial irony as Joe, a Texan dishwasher and hardly a cowboy—is appropriating a western look that was itself appropriated from an indigenous culture.
Fringe is also a centuries-old indigenous tradition, aligned with the philosophy to minimize any unused animal parts by cutting excess hide into strips that would be strategically sewn along a garment to guide water runoff. Joe’s thigh-length buckskin jacket has continuous fringe that follows across the arced chest yokes, around the set-in shoulder seams, and across the straight back yoke. The fringe also hangs from below the welted entry at the top of each hip pocket and curtaining the cuffs at the end of each sleeve.
Looking beyond the fringe, the three-button jacket is cut like a classic barn coat, with a flat collar and an extra button to close the neck—all the buttons are tan two-hole sew-through buttons.
Joe knots a dark neckerchief around his neck, reinforcing the costume-like nature of his outfit as he strides through the mean streets of the Big Apple. Though it appears black, the linen kerchief actually appears to be a dark shade of green.
The Fancy Western Shirts
Joe rotates through four colorful snap-front shirts that Harrison Hill observed in 2021 for GQ were all “embroidered with classic symbols of the American west: stars, birds, hearts, roses.”
For his fateful journey from Texas to New York, Joe pulls on a kelly-green shirt with western-themed embroidery on the shoulder yokes—which were themselves detailed in thick silver embroidery to resemble ropes. Each shoulder is detailed with a yellow-and-white horseshoe encircling a black-bordered, yellow-embroidered five-pointed star. The narrow spread collar also has a white five-pointed star embroidered on each leaf. The shirt has mother-of-pearl snaps up the front placket, two chest pockets that close with double-snap “sawtooth” flaps, and triple-snap squared cuffs—each with an additional snap to close the gauntlet.
Upon getting to New York, Joe changes into a cornflower-blue shirt as he sets out to find his first “client”. The narrow spread collar, snap-front placket, sawtooth-flapped chest pockets, and triple-snap cuffs echo the first shirt, though the design now consists of stars, birds, and a large red mini-beaded heart positioned over the left pocket (and, presumably, over Joe’s heart.)
The designs are all crafted with mini beads, with a swooping light-blue bird flying down from the left chest yoke above the left pocket, echoed by a slightly larger bird seemingly carrying a small red heart in its beak and perched above the right yoke. Both birds are flanked by two small silver stars. This motif continues onto the back, with an identical bird positioned at the center where the western yoke reaches its downward-facing point.
“Terrific shirt… I was just admiring that colossal shirt—I mean that’s one hell of a shirt,” Ratso comments during their first interaction. “Birds… I like birds.”
After Joe is locked out of his hotel, he seemingly only has access to one shirt for several months. This bright-red shirt is decorated around the shoulders with an embroidered floral motif of large red roses and smaller white flowers on green stems with navy-blue stars.
The cut, the narrow spread collar, and the triple-snap cuffs are similar to his earlier shirts, though the chest pockets have dramatically pointed single-snap flaps rather than the double-snap sawtooth flaps of his previous shirts.
After Joe finally lands his first paying client, the vivacious “alley cat” partygoer Shirley (Brenda Vaccaro), he uses part of her $20 payment to finally treat himself to a new shirt. It may be significant that he chooses a purple shirt, which visually unifies him with Rico in his shabby purple suit.
The purple base is complicated with a low-contrasting burgundy diagonal check and a fancy silver-trimmed double yoke that takes several hairpin turns and twists on its journey across the chest from the shoulders to the center, mimicked across the back. Two yellow-embroidered roses with green leaves are contained within each side of the yoke—one near the shoulder and another next to the placket.
This shirt also has a narrow collar and mother-of-pearl snaps up the front placket. The two chest pockets have dramatically pointed single-snap flaps, though these flaps are wider than on the red shirt.
Below the Belt
Joe cycles through two identical sets of western-styled trousers, detailed with pointed belt loops, slightly curved “full top” front pockets, and set-in back pockets covered with single-button pointed flaps. The tight fit “advertise precisely what he’s selling,” as Harrison Hill wrote for GQ, with a medium-high rise and a narrowly tapered cut through the legs down to the plain-hemmed bottoms that break high to show off his flashy boots.
When Joe spills ketchup on his trousers during an emotional and financial low point, the visual effect resembles a grotesque groin injury—suggesting that his failure has violently emasculated him.
Joe arrives in New York wearing these trousers in a light stone-colored polyester, only to unpack and swiftly don a pair of identical slacks in a slightly warmer shade of beige.
Joe holds the trousers up with a black tooled leather belt that closes through a decorative scalloped buckle with a gilt longhorn emerging from a burnished silver ground. (This remains a popular configuration for western belt buckles, with even inexpensive versions available from Amazon.)
Cass mulitasks.
“In his new boots, Joe Buck was six-foot-one and life was different,” begins James Leo Herlihy’s source novel, immediately establishing how crucial Joe’s colorful cowboy clothing would be in crafting his sense of self.
Voight’s Joe dons his boots with considerable ceremony, opening the box from HYER—a bootmaker that touts itself as the originator of the classic American cowboy boot when a customer entered cobbler C.H. Hyer’s Olathe, Kansas shop in 1875 and requested boots specifically for cattle-driving. Once America’s largest handmade boot manufacturer and even a military contractor, the HYER brand shuttered in the 1970s until it was revived in the early ’90s by C.H.’s great-great-grandson Zach Lawless.
Joe’s pointed-toe cowboy boots have all-black leather uppers with gold stitching, from the bug-and-wrinkle toes and seams to the leafy shaft stitching, all echoing the flashy gold starlike bursts positioned along the ankles on the bottom of each shaft. The hard leather soles are dyed black around the edges and have raised heels.
From Midnight Cowboy to Miami Tourist
As the bus gets closer to Miami, Joe steps off to spend about $10 on new clothes for Rico and himself, changing into the pale-yellow checked short-sleeved sport shirt, dark trousers, and black loafers and tossing all of his cowboy duds into the trash before rejoining Rico on the bus. “These shirts are comfortable, ain’t they? Yours was the only one left with a palm tree on it,” Joe comments to Rico.
♪ Love left me like this and I don’t want to exist / So take me to Florida ♪
Midnight Cowboy was one of the first major screen credits for prolific costume designer Ann Roth. A five-time Academy Award nominee and two-time winner (for The English Patient and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Ms. Roth may be most celebrated in the menswear community for her Oscar-nominated collaboration with Gary Jones on The Talented Mr. Ripley.
How to Get the Look
Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy (1969)
“I like the way I look… it makes me feel good—it does!”
- Tan fringed buckskin hip-length jacket with four-button front, fringed welted hip pockets, and set-in sleeves with fringed cuffs
- Colorful western shirts with narrow spread collar, decorative beaded shoulder embroidery, western-pointed yokes, two chest pockets with one- or two-snap pointed flaps, and triple-snap cuffs
- Dark-green linen neckerchief
- Light stone-colored polyester flat-front western trousers with pointed belt loops, curved full-top front pockets, set-in back pockets (with single-button pointed flaps), and short-break plain-hemmed bottoms
- Black tooled leather belt with gold longhorn-on-silver scalloped belt buckle
- Black leather pointed-toe cowboy boots with gold-stitched shafts/toes and gold starburst decorations
- Black felt telescope-crowned cowboy hat with silver-corded band and upturned brim
Do Yourself a Favor and…
Check out the movie.
The Quote
I ain’t a for-real cowboy, but I am one hell of a stud!
The post Midnight Cowboy: Jon Voight as Joe Buck appeared first on BAMF Style.