This year, it started with the spectacle of Charlotte Casiraghi, Grace Kelly’s granddaughter and 11th in line to the throne of Monaco, cantering down the Chanel couture runway on a gleaming bay named Kuskus. For better or worse, fashion and pop culture have long been in love with all things equestrian, running the gamut from Gucci’s classic Horsebit loafers to Kylie Minogue’s 2020 comeback single “Say Something,” in which she caresses an enormous golden horse while flying through space. But if a horse on the couture runway signaled a leveling up of contemporary equine lore, then Beyoncé astride a holographic steed for the cover of Renaissance, released in July, certainly clinched it: 2022 is the year of the horse girl.

Or horse woman. Or dude or man or person. We’re employing the term liberally here. (Though it is often a woman.) Historically, the horse girl has carried with her a certain cutesiness; she is viewed by others, perhaps, as a little bit dweeby. But there is nothing twee about the horse girl of 2022, and horses have long symbolized power and wide-ranging freedom—a natural yearning following years of being cooped up inside. “Creating this album allowed me a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world,” Beyoncé wrote in an Instagram caption, describing the making of Renaissance. “It allowed me to feel free and adventurous in a time when little else was moving.” She’s not alone in that sentiment. “I see horses running wild, I wish / I could feel like that for just a minute,” sings Maggie Rogers in “Horses,” a single from her new album, Surrender, released the same day as Renaissance. (Rogers was, for full disclosure, an intern at Elle magazine when I was on staff there.) “It’s a song about letting go,” Rogers has said of the song, “about wanting to feel free in a time where I felt an overwhelming amount of numbness.”

In going full futuristic Lady Godiva, Beyoncé—who has previously shot cover stories involving horses for British Vogue and Essence and Harper’s Bazaar, and who has nodded to her Houston roots in countless cowboy hats—invokes a woman who trounced her husband in one of history’s most famous games of chicken: The older and money-hungry Earl Leofric imposed a high tax on his subjects; when his wife asked that he take mercy and reduce the tax, he said that he’d only do so if she rode naked through the streets of Coventry. She did, so the legend goes, her long hair draped across her breasts, and, at least according to the 14th-century writer Ranulf Higden, Leofric kept his word and excused all tolls—except on horses. Per Beyoncé, bard of the Great Resignation:

“Now, I just fell in love / And I just quit my job / I’m gonna find new drive / Damn, they work me so damn hard / Work by nine, then off past five.”

“Driving home to a husband who will want to know whether therapy will help me,” writes Courtney Maum in her expansive memoir The Year of the Horses, published by Tin House earlier this spring, “to a daughter who will smell of milk and Goldfish crackers and whom it will take forty minutes to coerce into a bath, I think that I will take a white horse or a black one, anything that will help me face sundown with less dread.” In Maum’s memoir, rekindling a childhood love of horses as an adult—and as a mother—is a force for positive good within her family; the barn becomes a place to bond with her daughter, and working with the animals teaches her to find patience and generosity as a partner and parent.

At the end of 2021, after a 13-year horsey hiatus, I started taking weekly lessons at a barn near my house. The horse I ride with, a speckled gray gelding named Silvio, “likes” to work and particularly to jump. Or at least his behavioral cues lead the people who own and train him to believe he does—inasmuch as any human might infer the nonverbal cues of any other animal, given that we diverged from apes, our closest living neighbors on the evolutionary tree, millions of years ago. (“Obviously we’ll never know what it’s like to be a bat—that’s the Thomas Nagel thing,” the science writer and author of An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong, recently told my colleague Delia Cai in an interview at the National Zoo in DC. “But we can try. And it’s glorious and worthy to make the effort to do so.”) When Silvio sees a jump, his ears pivot forward, his gait speeds up. Our trainer refers to him as a point-and-shoot; as long as he can sense that I’m not wildly off-balance in the saddle, once we square with the jump, he’s going over the rails. But a statement about horseback riding on the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ website reads: “If we look honestly at our relationship with horses, we must acknowledge that the decision to take part in horseback riding is made solely by one individual with little benefit to and no input from the other.”

In Jordan Peele’s Nope, an early scene finds horse trainer Otis “OJ” Haywood Jr. working with a horse named Lucky on the set of a commercial. When a crew member ignores OJ’s instructions on proper horse etiquette, Lucky spooks and kicks, his hoof narrowly missing a nearby human’s head. It’s a moment of foreshadowing in a film that’s both easy and impossible to spoil, but it gives nothing away to say that the movie takes as source material Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion, a series of photographic plates that, when viewed together, flip-book style, comprise one of the earliest examples of a motion picture. While the name of the horse was preserved in the work’s subtitle—“‘Sallie Gardner,’ Owned by Leland Stanford; Running at a 1:40 Gait Over the Palo Alto Track, 19th June 1878”—the name of her rider, a Black jockey, was omitted and all but lost to history; he’s referred to in some documents as G. Domm, but little else is definitively known. (The footage shown in Nope is actually from a later Muybridge work, called “Plate 626,” which similarly leaves the jockey anonymous while naming the horse.) In Nope, Peele affords the man not only a fictional biography, but also descendants: OJ’s sister, Em, identifies herself as his great-great-great-granddaughter.

The movie, which opens on the bloody aftermath of a show business animal attack and proceeds in kind, is a tour de force of spectacle, erasure, and culpability. It’s a film about looking, about watching, and about what happens to the viewers and the ones being watched. (It’s worth noting that the term Peeping Tom finds its origin in the Lady Godiva story. During her naked ride, all of the townspeople of Coventry were said to have averted their gaze except for a single man, whose name was Tom. Legend has it that he was struck blind. One imagines that Beyoncé, a prodigious protector and creator of her own image, was well aware of that story line.)

Nope is also an equine celebration. There are long, beautiful shots of horses with and without riders thundering over the dry California dirt, tails streaming. Horses lit by moonlight. Horse snuffles and grunts. When a famed wildlife photographer suggests that OJ and Em send members of their herd out to bait the looming [redacted for spoilers], another character quickly corrects him: The Haywoods, he says, are horse people. Still, one cannot escape the irony of a film highlighting the exploitation of animals for human entertainment necessarily perpetuating that exploitation.

When I started riding again, I became obsessed with finding videos and photos of women working with their horses: Julia Krajewski and Amande de B’Neville, a selle Français, taking the gold medal in eventing at the Tokyo Olympics; Mary-Kate Olsen looking Row-approved at the Longines Paris Eiffel Jumping competition this summer; 16-year-old Compton Cowboy Zoie Brogdon sailing through a gymnastics line. And then I found the Skydog Sanctuary Instagram, and its short clips of its resident wild mustang bands, rescued following capture and sale by the Bureau of Land Management. They live, now, on a 9,000-acre ranch in Oregon. In some of the videos, horses make their way out of transport trailers into their newfound (relative) freedom, in others, Skydog founder Clare Staples narrates a frolicking filly’s recuperation. But in my favorites there’s no sign of humans at all. That is, aside from the camera’s gaze.