Led Zeppelin, Jerry Garcia, and Pink Floyd. The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. A strolling George Harrison across the cover of The Beatles' Abbey Road. All these men, these bands, may be iconic to classic rock, but they have another thing in common: They were fans of and wore the classic Western shirt. It wasn't just rock; folk, blues, and many other genres' luminaries, over the course of a decade from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s, were photographed wearing the classic American style. “If you go down all the genres of music," Nick Wetta, founder of West Major and maker of the best damn Western shirts in the world, tells The Manual, "you’ll find guys wearing Western shirts.”
Wetta, 31, is not a cowboy. Far from it — he's a self-described nerd who grew up in Arizona with no natural athleticism, but a passion for drum fills. His heroes were musicians, not horsemen, and to match their look, he'd pick through the racks of thrift-store pearl-snap shirts trying to find the perfect silhouette. "The fits were all over the place, and a lot for them were old and falling apart," he says. "But when I would find one that fit right, it was a grand slam.” Economy was only one reason for his secondhand sources; another was that those old shirts in photos were neither made nor marketed anymore; instead, the modern iteration, with its blousey fit and boring plaids, was geared toward Midwestern farmers. “And that is awesome," he says. "[But] it felt like there weren’t any Western brands for guys like me.”
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