Excerpt from the "Letter from the Editor" from the First Edition of the 2001 Magazine released to close friends in February of 2023.
I hope you enjoyed this season’s publication. We will be releasing a magazine with each collection because we like doing it and it’s also fun. “We” is a loose term because I currently do everything myself. But “we” will continue to make these magazines.
This edition focused on a singular question - “What is a cowboy?” I don’t know if we really answered it, but I’ll use this space to share three thoughts on the matter.
- Cowboy is a gender neutral term. When you think cowboy, an image conjures in your head that has been formed over decades and decades of repetitive messaging. We saw this when we prompted AI models -- it couldn’t even put a baseball hat on a cowboy. Let’s rethink that. Man, woman, anyone can be a cowboy.
- You can live in a city and be a cowboy. Cowboy is a state of mind that isn’t bound to a location. It’s about being independent, taking risks, having fun, and looking good while doing it. You can do that on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, in an office building in Seattle, or on a ranch in Montana. That’s why we live in Quintessential, California.
- Cowboys can be comfortable. You don’t have to wear an obnoxious cowboy hat or a tight fitting pearl snap to be a cowboy. To beat a dead horse, it’s a state of mind, not a costume.
Hopefully that answers the question. This was a lot of fun and hopefully enough people buy shirts so we can keep making these. They’re the most comfortable shirt you’ll ever wear.