in CultureWords By Jake Silbert
Getty Images / Arnaldo Magnani
It's funny that as flawed as Tony Soprano is, people still wanna be like him. It's not a feature unique to Tony or even The Sopranos in general, as plenty of dude see the antihero protagonists of American Psycho, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad and think something to the effect of, "He just like me fr."
But how many wannabe Carmelo Sopranos are out there, really?
Maybe more than you think. Maybe.
The "Mob Wife" aesthetic, as TikTok's calling it, does have impressive visibility for something conceived mere days ago. The term has over a quarter-billion views on the app, with some of the viral TikTok explainers asserting that the "clean girl" look is out; the mob wives are here.
Basically, the mob wife look boils down to a couple key elements — just remember, if Carmela could do it, you should too.
The makeup is LOUD. The hair is BIG. The sunglasses are BIGGER. The jewelry is GOLD. The jeans are TIGHT. The shoes are EXPENSIVE. The jacket is FUR (or faux, at least).
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The mob wife aesthetic is the antithesis of subtlety. Gaudiness is lauded and indulgence, like an overstuffed Italian dinner table, is everything.
Ironic that we're talking about the all-out mob wife look about a year after the birth of quiet luxury, its polar opposite. If quiet luxury is an upscale NYC penthouse, mob wives are a two-story McMansion in Noo Jawsey or Staten Island.
Admittedly, the mob wife movement does feel like a greater extension of the post-Y2K 2014 Tumblr aesthetic that's currently informing much of culture, so it doesn't feel like that much of a stretch for TikTok to toy with a curveball aesthetic.
That was back when Mob Wives was airing, by the way. Remember Mob Wives?
What I'm actually curious about, though, is if anyone is actually participating in the mob wife aesthetic. Like it's well and good to put on big eyelashes and pleather leggings for a TikTok video but is anyone actually adopting the look?
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The mob wife aesthetic feels more like a costume adapted from a half-serious TikTok that went viral than a proper stylistic push. That's not a bad thing, either, just a matter of fact.
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Somewhere along the way, like a game of telephone, the mob wife aesthetic mutated from joke to sincere, though the folks purposely affecting the mob wife look typically tone down the extremes to toned-down hair, slightly-exaggerated makeup, modestly provocative clothes.
The end result is less mob wife than Long Island-core, really. But who would actually go full-on mob wife besides, y'know, actual mob wives?
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These kinda TikTok trends are pure ephemera. An idea formulated in a video that goes viral in the morning inevitably inspires a host of iterators and reiterators that take it mass by noon before it dies a cheugy death by dinner.
Wherefore art thou, coastal grandmas? Tomato girls? Goblin mode enjoyers?
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of ideas born of TikTok that have long tails and the app really is a great bellwether of trends to come.
It allows you to see popular opinion formed in real time and many of the trends that bubble up into proper aesthetics at the very least speak to a culminative idea that may itself be only an offshoot of a bigger picture.
Consider the myriad Y2K offshoots that you've never heard of that're nevertheless patiently documented on the Aesthetic wiki: fairycore, fantasY2K, 2K1, cyber grunge. By comparison, mob wife ain't so crazy.
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Even still, I wouldn't expect the fascination with mob wives to last much longer than the other aesthetic du jour, despite what the many enterprising PR people who've flooded my inbox with timely "mob wife" products may hope. It's not sincere or aspirational (or even really specific) enough to have the legs necessary to earn longevity unless it becomes a generalized (and essentially meaningless) generalization in the same way as quiet luxury.
Apologies to all the actual mob wives (and goomahs) out there. The whole TIkTok mob wife thing is oogatz.
This article was published on January 18 and updated on January 25.
