On a grey Friday morning in a restaurant in New York City’s Meatpacking District, I arrive to meet Wendy Kunkle, owner of luxury Western-wear brand Kemo Sabe. I don’t have to try hard to find her. Kunkle and Kate Valdmanis, one of the company’s four vice-presidents, are both wearing cowboy hats as they sit, sipping coffee, in a red leather booth — which isn’t something you see very often at a Manhattan business breakfast.
Perhaps I should not be surprised, because cowboy hats have lately been popping up all over the place, as a fondness for Western wear has lassoed fashion. Variously credited to Beyoncé’s country pivot, Taylor Swift’s fan base and the Montana-set TV show Yellowstone, the look is emblematic of a romanticised, mythical America, an idea it either subverts or straight up celebrates, depending on the wearer. The aesthetic appeals to both sides of the political divide: cowboy hats were worn at the most recent Democratic and Republican national conventions.
Kemo Sabe is perhaps the most zeitgeisty purveyor of cowboycore in the land, worn by Beyoncé, RuPaul and Rihanna. Last September, Bella Hadid and her boyfriend Adan Banuelos (an actual cowboy) rode horses at a New York Fashion Week pop-up wearing Kemo Sabe.
Perhaps Kemo Sabe’s most visible fan, however, is Jeff Bezos, who wore the brand on the cover of US Vogue and ordered its hats for the entire crew for a 2021 rocket trip with Blue Origin.
The brand was founded by married couple Tom and Nancy Yoder in 1990 in Snowmass Village, near Aspen, the ski town playground for the 1 per cent. The VIP bar in its flagship store has recently hosted the Kardashian-Jenners and Jennifer Lopez, but many A-listers, including Yellowstone star Kevin Costner, who has a ranch in Aspen, Mariah Carey and Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, have been coming for decades.
Kunkle is a character. High-energy, unfiltered, quick to joke and to erupt in throaty cackles, full of stories about making “instant friends” with people like Carey. She and her staff would never ask for autographs or pictures, she says. “None of that stuff, that’s silly. Star-struck is a bad word in our store.”
Kunkle worked at Kemo Sabe for 15 years before buying the company in early 2020, together with her brother Bobby, who oversees finance, and their friend Andrew Wilson. They implemented a long list of changes, including buying a boot factory in El Paso, opening and closing stores (there were four, now there are six across Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Texas and Montana), running a countrywide roadshow of pop-up stores and revamping ecommerce (Kunkle describes the previous website as “unshoppable”). The idea has been “to show people who will never come to Aspen, which is most of the country, how fun we are”.
It is not any single celebrity, she says, but the broader American public who drive sales at the brand, which she estimates are up 313 per cent since 2019. Back then, the company had 24 employees; today it has more than 200.
Kunkle says that Covid created unexpected boom-time conditions, even though the store closed for three months soon after she bought it. When it reopened in May 2020, she stocked up on everything she could get from vendors and “sold the shit out of it. We broke records. Everyone wanted out of the city, there was no European travel, and they came to our little town. They just flooded it.”
Kunkle talks about “fun” a lot. The upbeat in-store experience is a big part of Kemo Sabe’s draw. Kunkle hires “bartenders and servers” rather than retail staff because she wants them to get the customers talking about their lives.
The brand offers a lot of customisation too. Her own hat, which she takes off to show me, currently features a Gucci scarf around the crown, with a packet of toothpicks from a restaurant she went to the previous night tucked into the silk; Valdmanis has a beaded hat band illustrated with the phases of the moon and a sweatband inside printed with the words “custom made for witchy vibes”.
They customise silver too, Kunkle tells me with a giggle, thunking a money clip embossed with the word #1BADASS, straining to contain a wodge of credit cards and cash, on the table.
Hats start at $350 and plenty of customers shop at the lower end, but prices can also reach five figures. “We’ve sold $20,000 hats before,” Kunkle says, thanks to accessories such as $18,000 tennis necklaces that can be wrapped around the crown of the hat. Hats are made from either rabbit or beaver fur, something Kunkle says is vital for the “traditional” experience. “That’s how this country came about. With these hats,” she says, “not because it was cool to look at but for function. It’s good for rain, snow and sun, any kind of condition.” I ask whether there is a vegetarian option. “No,” she says, then smiles. “Oh wait. Straw hats. That is vegetarian.”
The recent buzz around cowboy attire has elicited questions about its appropriation by celebrities. Mega-influencer Alix Earle told her followers that she was teased after buying a Kemo Sabe outfit. “I love your Aspen costume!” a passer-by trilled. But Kunkle isn’t having that: “Aspen is the West! I don’t see this as a costume. I think people get weirded out that we are having so much fun.”
As the brand’s popularity has mushroomed, some eyebrows have also been raised about its name. Kemosabe was the nickname given by the Native American character Tonto to the Lone Ranger on the 1930s radio show of the same name, the politics of which feel a bit complicated for a white-owned business in 2025. But Kunkle is not one for hand-wringing. “It’s a made-up Hollywood name. It means trusted friend, I don’t understand why that would be upsetting.”
Generally, she says, she is unbothered by politics. “I could care less about politics. I don’t watch the news. I live in my little bubble with my girls. Whatever happens to me, we will react and figure it out. I don’t have to worry about what might come. You have one life — better enjoy it.”
And that’s what the people want, it seems: the Kemo Sabe swagger, which Kunkle embodies. She cites herself as an example of the American dream — something she still ardently believes in (“Hell, yes!”). She grew up “lower middle class” in a “little cornfed town” in Ohio, then worked as a zoologist (“I wanted to be Dian Fossey but I quickly found out I could make no money as Dian Fossey”) before visiting, and falling in love with, Aspen.
She describes Aspen as “ridiculous” in its wealth, but also alluring, like “Disneyland for adults . . . When you fly in, and you look out the window, you’re just like, ‘Are you kidding me? Is this real?’ It’s so beautiful.” Layer the seduction of Aspen with idealised stories of the cowboy era and the appeal of Kemo Sabe’s version of America as a brave and pioneering nation is potent, particularly for the brand’s audience, which remains largely homegrown.
The cowboy, Kunkle says “just conjures up sexy. You don’t think of an accountant and go, ‘Wow, I’d like to go to bed with that guy.’ But when you see a cowboy, you’re like, ‘Oh! That imagery. The West.’ When you go to Aspen you see it, you breathe it. It is just sexy. Aspen is sexy. Cowboys are sexy. Horses are sexy. What isn’t sexy about that life? It’s an American classic.”
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