West Major’s Revival of the American Western Shirt
From dive bars to design tables, designer Nick Wetta crafts a modern classic
In a dusty Phoenix garage, backed by the hum of music and the grit of persistence, Nick Wetta stitched a dream into cotton. The founder of West Major wasn’t always a designer. He came up on drums and dive bars, band rehearsals and thrift store digs, in a time when western shirts were a rite of passage for music-loving misfits in the desert. But Wetta turned nostalgia into a blueprint. Today, West Major is one of the few brands bringing western shirts back to their roots—quite literally—by making them on American soil.
It all started with a vintage thrift score in Santa Barbara, the kind of find that haunts your thoughts long after the car ride home. "Why isn’t anyone making shirts like this anymore?" he wondered. The idea was shelved for years while Wetta toiled in Los Angeles’ entertainment industry, but it never left him. By 2017, disillusioned with Hollywood and hungry for something real, he turned back to his desert roots and began building what would become West Major.