Duster (clothing)
light, loose-fitting long coat
A duster is a light, loose-fitting, long coat.
History
The original dusters were full-length, light-colored canvas or linen coats worn by horsemen in the United States to protect their clothing from trail dust. These dusters were typically slit up the back to hip level for ease of wear on horseback.
Dusters intended for riding may have features such as a buttonable rear slit and leg straps to hold the flaps in place.
For better protection against rain, dusters were made from oilcloth and later from waxed cotton.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both men and women would wear dusters to protect their clothes when riding in open motorcars on the dirt roads of the day.
Today: Revival through film and television
Western horsemen's dusters figured little in Western films until Sergio Leone re-introduced them in his movies The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). According to production designer Carlo Simi, Leone was fond of dusters. The two of them went to look for men's wear at the Western Costume shop in California, which was a very large warehouse on the Warner Brothers lot and was dispensing most costumes worn in Westerns filmed in the US. There, they happened upon some dustcoats for riding horse, which had already been shown in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The coats were white but the Leone team changed them to chocolate brown.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Duster (clothing)” is light, loose-fitting long coat. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Duster, clothing and light, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q932999. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1966 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Duster (clothing)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.