Fashion Has Legitimized the Mob Wife
Mob wives. The mob wives are everywhere. Or so they'd have you believe. Across the first two months of 2024, I received nearly four-dozen emails on the subject, as if this was some massively influential trend spilling over from TikTok into real life.
Except it wasn't, really.
Sure, in early January, a couple viral-ish videos broke through with bold declarations: clean girl is out! Mob wife is in! I still don't even know what clean girl is.
And the fact that even one of Pookie's absolutely fire outfits tapped into the mob wife look sure seemed to indicate that the mob wife look was actually a thing.
But, really, it wasn't. Mob Wives were a wildly short-lived TikTok "trend" — more of a joke, really —that, like, the coastal grandmas and robot makeup hacks before them, were doomed to disappear as quickly as they drove in from Jersey.
Except they didn't.
Back in January, I had extraordinarily little faith that the mob wives would outlast the month.
The look, such that it was, was too broadly unspecific for its own good. Big hair, fur coats, and leopard-printed shirts were surely too cliché, too untetherable to latch into a culture beyond a couple popular TikToks. If anything, the mob wife smacked of a trend being forced into existence not by people indulging in it but by bemused onlookers commenting on it.
And yet, here we are, a couple months away from the locus of 2024's least genuine trend and, though the mob wife look is just barely limping along, fashion designers have seemingly proposed that it endures through the end of the year.
I'm just going off of the recent Fall/Winter 2024 runway shows, where there was a surprisingly ample selection of fur, leggings, and leather, a mob wife's sugar and spice. Now, fur is to be expected — we've awaited its return since the start of the season — but the context is surprisingly mobbish.
To be clear, it wasn't like Carmela Soprano hit the runways of Paris — though that'd be a welcome turn for Edie Falco — but you saw shades of the mob wife filtering through the catwalk presentations. Really, subtle mob wife is the most fashionable way to do mob wife, if you must do mob wife at all.
At YSL, the mob wife was tastefully sultry, with her furs, jewelry, and leggings intact but hair demurely covered. At Gucci, the mob wife's leathers were refined into red peacoats and short, belted coats embossed with the house's monogram.
At Off-White™, the mob wife prepared for her big night out, slipping on fur-trimmed trenches, thigh-high leather boots, shredded denim coats, and leather varsity jackets wrapped around the torso and trimmed with beads. At Balenciaga, the mob wife returned home, her tights torn, face obscured by massive shades, and body wrapped in floor-scraping faux coat.
Even at the typically reserved Chanel, models were Adriana'd-up in shearling coats and enormous hater-blockers, their ears, necks, and wrists fully gilded and glistening.
And at at the otherwise preppy (and typically excellent) Miu Miu show, Gigi Hadid closed the runway in classic mob wife mode: big ol' fur jacket, pearl necklace, Miu Miu bag shoved under the arm.
It's all fairly non-specific, I'll admit, but that was always part of what made the so-called mob wife trend so blandly costumely in the first place.
Like, is mob wife really a trend if only people online are talking about it? And if there's not really a clear definition.
Which is what makes fashion's semi-legitimization of the look so surprising. The fur I expect. The tights, the omnipresent big shades, the heavy gold jewelry, the night-out joie de vivre of it all, less so.
There's a natural overlap between the mob wife, Y2K, and groovy '70s trends, what with mob wife pulling from effectively the same early aughts streetwear and '70s camp as the other two, which is at least partially what gives it such surprising longevity.
The generality of it all also helps, I assume: the "mob wife" look can live on as long as it can be broadly applied to anything even tangential.
But I will admit that the look worn by trend-savvy Addison Rae in late February while Fashion Week was in full swing was pretty quintessentially mob wife, down to the leopard-printed leggings and peep-toe spiked heels.
If she's willing to lean into mob wife, maybe there's something here after all. Fashion designers sure seem to, at least a little.
You can't force trends. They are ephemeral ghosts that haunt popular culture, briefly dictating the ways we think, talk, dress, act, and they're as impossible to grasp as ectoplasm.
Except for when, sometimes, you can.
Through sheer exuberance, the internet brought the mob wife into being and kept her alive long enough that fashion brands (inadvertently) designed her an impressively tasteful wardrobe for Fall/Winter 2024.
It's not mob wife as you know it: it's the next generation, mob wife 2.0. This time, she's fancy.
Marone.
