Give 'em the Boots

A visitation of things both "wild" and "Western" couldn't possibly be complete without a style element, so the concept of the Fresh City Life exhibit I Wanna Be a Cowboy, and You Can Be My Cowgirl, which opens today at the Denver Central Library, was a dead-on no-brainer for Fresh City's man on the fashion beat, Chris Loffelmacher. It was, in fact, an act of kismet: As he and fellow program director Audrey Sprenger were putting together this spring's Wild, Wilde West cultural series for the DPL, they discovered that artist Ed Adler, who will play a key role in pulling the program's whole "Oscar Wilde in Denver" theme together, is best friends with Tony Benattar of the Liberty Boot Company, otherwise known as supplier of cowboy boots to the rock stars (including Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow and Andre 3000, among many others).

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So at Adler's suggestion, Loffelmacher gave Benattar a call, and the bootmaker has happily shipped the library a mystery cache of rock-star boots — which are typically heavily detailed in the Ed Hardy tradition, with flowers, skulls, crossbones and pinup devil girls — for the month-long exhibit. And what's a boot without the duds? The exhibit will also include a collection of treasures from Denver's own Rockmount Ranch Wear, including vintage shirts from the 1940s and Rockmount originals used in the movie Brokeback Mountain. Yee-ha!

The library is at 10 West 14th Avenue Parkway; see I Wanna Be a Cowboy in the level-one Fresh City Lounge through May 31. Get information at www.denverlibrary.org/fresh or 720-865-1206.
May 5-30, 2008