I ended up in a black SUV with Adan Banuelos and Bella Hadid for a reason most Texans are familiar with—it was too damn hot. It’s 5:45 p.m., and we’re at a Weatherford ranch owned by sports media company Teton Ridge. Hadid is in girlfriend mode.
“I just think he’s going to start losing it if he’s in the sun for too long,” she says. Hadid, who landed from New York minutes prior, is a vision even in the unyielding ranch sun. (Banuelos picked her up in a helicopter from the airport.) They’ve choppered here to promote Window to the West, Teton Ridge’s six-part collection of short films that aim to encapsulate Western culture via vignettes of athletes, craftsmen, and musicians. The series opener, Horse Sense, stars champion horseman Banuelos and his family—interspersed with the obviously necessary, but not overwhelming, cameos of his supermodel girlfriend cheering on her man, and riding herself. In deference to the fear of grumpiness—which, to be fair, descends on us all at 95 degrees—we headed into a parked car with blasting air-conditioning.
Just days ago, the cowboy couple unofficially closed New York Fashion Week with a horse show on the streets of Manhattan. They filled a city block with pounds of dirt and demonstrated techniques involved in the equestrian sport of cutting, wherein a rider separates a single cow from a herd, for hundreds of on-lookers. “I didn’t know Fashion Week was going on. I had no f—ing idea,” Banuelos says of the event. “I didn’t find out until people that we respect [told us] that ‘everybody who’s somebody’ was in town. All the cameras decided to show up to this little horse thing.”
The show garnered the media coverage that Teton Ridge was no doubt looking for—Vogue, New York magazine, Page Six, etc.—but Banuelos was still recovering from the pressure it put on the horses. “You’re leading horses through a crowd of people that are literally touching your horse all the way through and these people don’t know that this horse could wipe you off the face of the earth right now,” he says of the crowded New York streets. “I was very proud of the horses handling that, and I was proud of us, too, of the way that it just felt natural and it felt smooth.”
It’s one thing to bring a bit of Texas to NYC’s Meatpacking District, but it’s another to screen a Window to the West short in the West. I had planned to start my conversation with Banuelos and Hadid with some metaphorical thinking: “If you had your own little window, filled with all of your hopes and dreams, what would you see?” But the couple in front of me felt simply too grounded—Hadid eating a paper-wrapped sandwich, Banuelos on the phone with a buddy. For a bird’s-eye view of the series, I turned to Deirdre Lester, CEO of Teton Ridge.
The company’s goal is to have these films live on their platforms for streaming, taking advantage of the country music– and Yellowstone-ification of the zeitgeist. “There’s this endemic audience that truly live this lifestyle, and the world has become increasingly interested in, whether it be ranches or going to ranches, visiting ranches, horses, the rodeos,” Lester tells me. “That said, we think it’s not a trend. We think it’s a lasting tradition that’s been around longer than any other in the sports side of things, longer than any sport in America.”
The sport in question is undeniably Banuelos’s calling: He’s a National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Famer and back-to-back American Performance Horseman event champion. “It’s very beautiful, it’s very artful and also very competitive,” Lester says of cutting. After their NYC demonstration, it’s clear to her that “right now in this moment, [what] Bella is to cutting is what Taylor Swift is to the NFL.”
Much like Kelce, Banuelos is not afraid to bring up his girlfriend in interviews. He seems most comfortable talking about Hadid, and how their passion for horses makes them stronger as a couple. “It took me some convincing to get her to do this [event] because she was like, ‘Hey, this is for you. This is your film, this is it.’ And I’m like, ‘Baby, it’s not me anymore. It’s us now.’ I’ve never felt that way about anybody. Being able to . . . I’m not going to say show off my woman, but a little bit, you know, in a respectful way. The world has seen her and thinks that she’s beautiful. But in my opinion, they’ve only seen about ten percent of how beautiful she is because she’s a phenomenal human being.” And that’s only about half the quote. He also told me that Hadid was “born with a feel for horses,” which, after only a few minutes with him, I can tell is one of the biggest compliments Banuelos could ever give.
There were actual horses on-site, taking in the sunset over the fields along with the rest of us as friends and family settled in for the intimate screening. Donkeys armed with beer moseyed around, children played roping games with stationary bulls, and cowboys dug through ice chests filled with Kin Euphorics, the nonalcoholic cocktail company that Hadid cofounded. It was comical really, watching as the men in cowboy hats and boots weighed whether or not they wanted to feel, as Kin promises, “grounding calm” or “beaming joy.”
The short film provided an intimate look into the inner workings of the Banuelos family—especially his father Ascencion, the first Mexican American to be inducted into the National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame, who teared up when Adan, onscreen, described his dad as “his best friend.” The son’s candidness was similar to the moments I shared with him hours prior, back in the SUV. With the air blasting and providing a sort of calming white noise in the background, Adan and I began to wrap up our conversation when I saw a flurry of movement behind Banuelos’s head outside. Hadid was sitting up against a tree finishing her sandwich as her cowboy boyfriend went on and on about how incredibly in awe he is of her. Out of his metaphorical window, we’d see Bella, we’d see his friends and family, we’d see the weight of an enduring legacy, and perhaps above all else, we’d see horses.
