The Fort Worth venue will now be named Ariat Arena.

Mike Brooks

Fort Worth’s biggest stage just traded its work pants for a pair of boots.

Dickies Arena is now Ariat Arena, effective immediately, Trail Drive Management Corp. and Ariat International announced Monday. The 10-year naming rights deal ends a stretch in which the old name had been fraying at the seams.

The unraveling began when Bluestar Alliance, a New York brand management company, bought Dickies, a Fort Worth workwear staple since 1922. According to WFAA, the new owners moved the company’s headquarters out of town in 2025 and laid off 125 employees on the way out. Then, naming rights apparently became optional and Trail Drive sued for $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleges Bluestar created an assetless shell company, Dickies Acquisition II LLC, and dumped its payment obligations into it to dodge the contract. If true, that’s one heck of a patch job.

Enter Ariat, which was already well-heeled in Cowtown. The company was founded in 1993 and named after the racehorse Secretariat, making its name by sneaking athletic shoe tech into Western boots. Ariat runs a regional headquarters here, where it’s investing more than $70 million and adding 250 jobs, and it has a flagship store in Mule Alley at the Stockyards. It also sponsors the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo and the Ariat Texas Rattlers PBR team. Safe to say this rename has been spurred along for a while.

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“Putting our name on this iconic arena is the next chapter, and we’re honored to welcome the community for rodeos, concerts and sporting events,” Ariat CEO Liz O’Neill said in a statement.

Mayor Mattie Parker added, “I can’t think of a better naming partner than Ariat.”

The 14,000-seat venue ranked No. 1 by Pollstar among similarly sized venues worldwide in 2025. Temporary signs are going up now, and permanent ones should land by year’s end, before the Stock Show’s 130th anniversary kicks off on Jan. 15.

Looking back, we may have missed the real story. When Phoebe Bridgers played Dickies Arena on Oct. 18, she wore painted-on tears, led a red-lit primal scream through “I Know the End” and had her band play the crowd out to “Never Going Back!” We called it a concert review. Turns out it was a eulogy.