RANCH ROMANCE, Summer 2024 by doubledranch

Untriggered: Ranch Romance, Summer 2024

Ranch Romance Jacket, Flirt Dress, Double D Ranch Jewelry, City Slicker Hat

Finding Ranch Romance

Sometimes you find inspiration where you least expect it. And sometimes, it finds you.

Sitting in a sleepy airport in way west Montana, on the tail end of a beautiful but characteristically exhausting photoshoot, a rare reality set in. A production deadline loomed large and imminent and the drawing board for that collection was still completely blank. Then, and not a moment too soon, a cowboy came into view and we were in love. No, not Prince Charming or some bowlegged beau out of a frontier fairytale, but a colorful character nonetheless. Enter the artwork of Larry Pirnie, fortuitously on display in the Missoula airport, calling to us with captivating color and relatable subjects that spoke to us with sentiments of young love, summertime, and retro ranch living.

Extraordinarily talented and a unique study in the evolution of aesthetics, Larry Pirnie is a prolific painter who cut his teeth on classic cowboy scenes, carved his own niche with electrifying color, and cemented his place among one of the most coveted and collectible modern artists in recent history. And on that day, a chance encounter with his artwork charted the course for this collection, a style story celebrating the simplicity of summer love and everything that’s wrapped up in Ranch Romance.

Just like that, from the runway of an airport that sees fewer than a dozen departures a day, a oncein-a-lifetime creative collaboration took off.

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D Ranch Accessories 9

Color Kid Vest, Double

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“I’m a little drunk on you, and high on summertime…”

- Luke Bryan

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Vintage Double D Ranch Belt, Cowboy’s Sweetheart Jacket

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Wide Open Trails Boots

Santiago Boots

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Larry Pirnie: Let The Kid Come Through

From comic book aspirations, to classic cowboy artist, to captivating with color in an unbridled way, Larry Pirnie is – finally – living his childhood dream.

Like many creatives, his art began as an escape. Holed up in his trailer park home, hiding from the neighborhood ruffians who made sport of breaking his glasses, Larry indulged himself in adventures of his own making, drawing cowboys and horses and setting his sights on being a comic book artist living on a ranch one day. After a chance meeting with Norman Rockwell, who imparted the hard truth that “there’s a good chance you’re never going to be a professional artist”, Larry followed his dream on the path he thought he ‘ought’ to take, getting a formal art education degree from the Pratt Institute in New York. He went corporate, making visuals for a mainstream marketing department, until the untimely death of his daughter served as a wakeup call and sent him wandering West to Montana.

“If you’re going to live your dream, there’s no guarantee you’re going to be around tomorrow to do it,” he said. “So, you’d better get to it.”

Even still, he was playing it safe, creating traditional cowboy art that his wife Irene was brokering to different galleries throughout the country.

“We were making a living, but I almost quit because I was so bored,” he admitted. “I was trying to be ‘a western artist’, not Larry Pirnie.”

After some soul searching and consciously studying works he admired and that resonated with him, he pinpointed what they all had in common.

“I came up with two words: bold and colorful,” he said. “And guess what my work wasn’t? Bold and colorful. That’s when the kid in me took over. I learned a lot about color and my relationship with it, and then I also learned that my mind could not control it, that I had to let the kid do the playing. As soon as I turned my art over to the kid, this color came out of me that I can’t explain to people.”

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“Beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it’s the middle that counts the most. Try to remember that when you find yourself at a new beginning. Just give hope a chance to float up.”

- Hope Floats, 1998

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Good Night, Irene

All of life is a love story, if you think about it, in one way or another. Seeking, celebrating, supporting, someone or something you love – be it a passion, a purpose, or a person.

The culmination of this creative collaboration was not exactly a love story, per se, but a story of love in the most meta sense. We fell in love with the art, then we fell in love with the love story behind it, and in the end, it was both the initial ember and the final seal on the deal.

Once upon a time in Big Fork, Montana, a recently relocated and somewhat rudderless artist met a gal in a honky tonk who would indelibly alter the trajectory of his life and his life’s work.

“About three months into [living in Big Fork], I met a cowgirl from Montana,” Larry laughed, with a tongue-incheek twang on ‘cowgirl’. “Just a wild and crazy gal. Her husband had died in a plane crash, and she had five children who she was finished raising, and she became a wonderful, wonderful person in my life.”

That woman was Irene, and she became his wife and greatest advocate for his art, putting him in galleries all over the West, despite himself.

“She would always say, ‘This guy I just married spends more time talking people out of his artwork than into it!’” he recalled fondly. “She was a very special person; I think people signed on with me just so they could see her a couple times a year. Any popularity I have at all, she’s the reason for it.”

Irene has since passed away, but talking to Larry, it’s evident his love for her lives on. And rumor has it, when we were courting him for the collaboration on this collection, what sold him on it was a piece we mocked up featuring his painting ‘Moonstruck’ on a jean jacket we named – you guessed it – ‘Good Night, Irene’.

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45 Truly

Boots

Up & Over Tee, Vintage Double D Ranch Belt

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The Look of Love

What does love look like? It sounds like a question a wide-eyed child might ask their mama at bedtime, but when it came to capturing this collection, it was one we had to ask ourselves.

Concepting a collection is only half the battle. We have to bring it to life, to give it a story and a setting and put on paper the images that danced in our heads for months – in a way that makes sense and in a way that connects you to the heart and soul of the designs. For Ranch Romance, we wanted it to read like a love story, to feel like summertime, and to evoke an emotion of nostalgia. Initially, we thought it might even be “Red Truck Romance” that harkens back to an old vintage truck, but in the end, we simply kept coming back to the 1998 film Hope Floats.

Odds are it’s been a minute since you’ve seen the heart-wrenching-turned-heartwarming flick, and you’ve probably long forgotten the details and perhaps even the plot, but it’s likely you remember pulling for the protagonist (Sandra Bullock) and rooting for the romance (with Harry Connick Jr.). And that feeling of by-proxy bliss when it all comes together? Well, that’s what we hoped Ranch Romance would feel like.

First Blush Jacket, City Slicker Hat

“When she remembered a summer, it would be this one. When she remembered a love, it would be his.”

- C.J. Carlyon

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Jukebox Favorites

There’s an old saying, “the song remembers when”, and there is certainly a truth to the notion that a person can be totally transported by another place and time; everyone has a tune or two that stops you in your tracks.

Maybe it’s a song that cemented a particular moment in time. Maybe the lyrics tell the tale of your first love. Maybe it’s just one of those ditties that lives rent-free in your brain and causes a curl of your lips every time you catch yourself humming it. It’s fair to say that a personal playlist is probably different for everyone, but we’ve compiled a couple of catchy tunes that we think speak pretty universally to the soundtrack of summer love.

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Double D Ranch Jewelry

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Tattoo You Boots

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Highway Honey Boots

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“If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.”

- Bernard Williams

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Haute Honkytonk Nights

Whether a Saturday night out on the town for you entails a swanky steakhouse and couture cocktails or taking spins around a sawdustsprinkled floor in a divey dance hall, one thing’s for sure – the attire is taking a turn toward twang.

Lainey Wilson famously sings that “country’s cool again”, and that sentiment certainly reverberates from the runways right now. Denim is nothing new, of course, but so much else that is making its way to mainstream has roots in what would’ve once been considered the farWestern fringe of fashion. Think Nudie Coheninspired suits, an uptick in the incorporation of Western welts, velvets in year-round silhouettes, and fringe on almost everything imaginable. And accessories aren’t exempt from the Western wave: bling is back in a big way, whether it’s rhinestone details or draping diamonds among your desert pearls; trophy buckles, particularly vintage ones, are hugely in demand; and, if you haven’t noticed, cowboy boots are no longer relegated to the rodeo – you can hardly swing a lasso without hitting’ a pair, on everyone from the hipsters to the high-falutin.

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