I was browsing inside a curated vintage store in Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone, a haven for wide-brimmed hat-wearing pilates mommies and millennials indulging in an afternoon of wine tastings when I saw the rack of fur coats. Every vintage store has one, but now the fur coat holds new meaning. A blond, skinny jean-clad woman excitedly draped one over her shoulders and modeled a white, snow bunny-esque rabbit fur coat to her boyfriend in a trucker hat who couldn’t care less about anything inside that place.
“Babe look, I’m a mob boss wife!” she said to her man sitting in one of the store’s mid-century leather chairs.
You’ve almost got it, I thought. But it’s mob wife and it is so much more than that coat you’ve got on. As a seasoned watcher of The Sopranos, the show that inspired the aesthetic, I’ve got my own pulse on what mob wife actually means and that it encompasses all aspects of these women’s wardrobes, not just their flashiest formal wear.
I have my boyfriend to thank for getting me hooked on HBO’s cult favorite show detailing the head-shaking and finger-wagging lives of the New Jersey and New York mafia. The show, while more violent than what I typically watch, is grippingly suspenseful, running for 6 full seasons from 1999 to 2007. Family tensions, man hunts, petty arguments turned vendettas. But the fashion of the mob’s wives, girlfriends and side pieces kept me tuning in every night. Soon one episode would turn into two or three, and I loved watching how the fashions of each character evolved from episode to episode or season to season as the early 2000s progressed along with it.
The show’s continual popularity is thought to be attributed to the explosion of the mob wife aesthetic on social media. Yet, platforms like TikTok celebrate the all-out-version of it, as does any clothing trend or ‘-core’ that hyper-fixates on a style of dress. The mob wife, on social media, is painted as someone highly complicit in her husband’s crimes and constantly clad in black, metallics, pearls and furs. A martini is always in hand.
In watching The Sopranos, I witnessed the fashion of these New Jersey women with out-of-reach lifestyles in all aspects of their lives from a cousin’s glitzy movie premiers to preparing Sunday dinner in their mansion’s kitchen. Through an additional deep dive into the wardrobe decisions behind shaping the show’s image of the mob wife, I realized I understood mob wife on a personal, memory-informed level.
The show’s costume designer Juliet Polsca revealed in an interview for Entertainment Tonight that inspiration for the wives’ looks spawned from hanging around the malls of New Jersey where wealthy housewives shopped when mall culture was at its peak. Polsca’s main supplier of the mob wife wardrobe was Cache, a women’s boutique started by New Yorker Marilyn Rubinson in 1975, gaining the most traction in the early 2000s with hundreds of stores nationwide. The store closed all locations in 2015 as its flashy designs didn’t fit into emerging trends that celebrated high-quality basics and minimalist fashion bought primarily online rather than in massive malls.
I know Cache very well. Possibly too well. My mom’s entire early 2000s wardrobe was Cache, from blouses and basic layering tanks to jeans and costume jewelry. As a young child dragged along to these shopping trips, I played with my sister among the racks of vibrant polyester gowns which were shown styled with chunky necklaces and metallic, strappy heels.
The textbook case of mob wife is Carmela Soprano, the over-stressed, always-pissed (and rightfully so) wife of New Jersey boss and the show’s frontrunner Tony Soprano. I describe Carmela’s aesthetic as tailored, classy, colorful and silently exquisite. Whichever outfits my mom purchased from Cache aspired to mimic Carmela’s. Think quiet luxury but y2k and you’ll be imagining the ribbed knit basics that Carmela pairs with capris, a fresh blowout, kitten heels and simple jewelry pairings that flaunt her family’s mysteriously-earned wealth. Let’s not forget her French tips that extend to the heavens, an iconic, signature nail look of which I was reminded when a TikTok about the nails of The Sopranos from none other than the show’s manicurist herself popped up on my feed. She is the mob queen, a tasteful image of soft glam.
The internet has obsessed the most over the looks of Adriana La Cerva (cordially known as Ade), and placed her as one of the it girls of the aesthetic. Yet Ade, who isn’t a mob wife but the fiancé of mob member Christopher, is younger thus her clothing is more risqué, trashier and a lot less practical. Her style is atrociously aspirational, flirty and fun. Think skin-tight catsuits, cleavage-baring tops and stilettos.
But the internet’s got it all wrong: she isn’t a mob wife by definition thus I take issue with placing her at the center of this trend. Polsca reveals that Ade’s wardrobe wasn’t even sourced from mob wife mecca Cache but rather from Arden B, an offshoot of young women’s boutique Wet Seal. Despite these technical workarounds the meaning of ‘mob wife,’ it’s no question why her looks still resonate with a younger audience given the popularity of y2k mall brand styles (one scroll on Depop is more than enough evidence). May she rest in animal print.
Yet, the looks that captivate me the most from watching the show every night for months are those worn in the day-to-day while men are out shuffling money and harassing business competitors that are disrupting important revenue streams. The everyday wear of the show’s women isn’t as glamorous and hasn’t made it to the internet yet, but these fits make up the bulk of the show’s wardrobe department. These looks include Carmela’s collection of velvety tracksuits, candy-colored, plunging one-piece swimsuits and other ‘off-duty’ looks worn when accompanied by her girls. In these casual looks, I relished in my sentimentality remembering the velour Juicy Couture matching sets my late mother wore during this period. This nostalgia felt comforting amidst consistent displays of such gruesome violence.
In one case, I found one of my mom’s most worn items staring directly at me on Rosalie Aprile, Carmela’s close friend and brunette counterpart, during their girls trip to Paris in the final season. The trip allows the women to break away from their stressful lives out in Jersey and lean more into a chicer sensibility, departing from their tackier ensembles.
Out to lunch at presumably Café Flore, Ro dons a lacy black and white top, with a flouncy collar I immediately recognized from a Cache top bought during the peak of my mom’s obsession with the retailer from 2004-2008. It’s witchy but a little French, disheveled but was somehow worn to work by my gastroenterologist mother with a black tank underneath, pencil skirt and black riding boots. Its lower neckline is distracted by a tie-front, wide sleeves and fabric-covered buttons that trail from beneath the bust to the hem.
I salvaged the top from my family home and try to style it from time to time in Gen Z fashion with black flares and my burgundy Doc Marten Jadons to add a bit of edge. The top, while fraying in some places and stained from years of wear, is something I don’t think I’ll ever part with. The fact that it’s been worn by a character in my most-watched show as of late makes me love it even more.
Keep in mind, I come from the furthest to a mob family as a Jewish Californian with no Italian ancestry nor dealings in illegal business. But after watching hours of the show that spawned this discourse, ‘mob wife’ is not at all what social media purports it to be as an out-of-reach aesthetic of fluffy jackets and cross necklaces. Mob wife can be approachable, comfortable, affordable. Plus, some of the women truly do possess goodness in them despite ties to violent crime.
But in this reexamination of what women actually wore in the early 2000s — one overshadowed by our current fixation on what low-rise and rhinestone-encrusted things twenty-somethings were sporting at the time — I found the ‘mob wife’ living in my memories, my closet, and, from time to time, on me.
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