drugstore cowboy

plural drugstore cowboys

1. datedSomeone who dresses and acts like a cowboy but has none of the skills.

   When we first came to California and we started putting on Westerns, there were no riders in Hollywood; they were all drugstore cowboys.

   1974, Film Heritage

   2 more examples

   The Soviet Union, he [Marlin Fitzwater] insisted, was engaged “in a very strange pattern of public-relations gambits”; he compared Mikhail Gorbachev to a “drugstore cowboy,” an old-fashioned term for a pretentious impostor.

   [1989 May 29, “Who's a ‘Drugstore Cowboy’?”, in Newsweek, page 29

   I was raised on Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and as a kid I dreamed of doing the things real cowboys do—not drugstore cowboys or rodeo cowboys, but the real sweat-and-dirt variety—like roping and riding, herding cattle, and breaking horses.

   1990, Kenny Rogers, “Introduction”, in Cowboy Tales: Western Classics from American Masters, Viking Studio Books, →ISBN

   Synonyms: dude

2. A young man who loafs around town, especially a lady's man who hangs out in public places in an attempt to pick up girls.

   I saw Duel in the Sun late one Friday afternoon, came out blinking at the drugstore cowboys standing in front of the fly-spattered windows of the cafe across the street […]

   1984, Carolyn Osborn, The Fields of Memory, Bryan, Texas: Shearer Publishing, →ISBN, page 14

   1 more example

   When any of these jazz-age drugstore cowboys starts trying to fool around with his sister, he won't mince his words. He'll say, "See here, now, what do you mean, trying to ruin my sister?"

   1934, James T. Farrell, chapter 21, in The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan