#mobwife
Representation. Longing. Belonging.
I open the front door of my house to greet her. She pushes herself in, while pulling me closer to her. “Mary! Vini ca!! Look at you!” She’s balancing a plate in one hand and hugging me. I wonder what is under that foil. My face lands right at her chest. If I was only six or seven years old, she was only about a foot taller than me, even in heels. I nestle in, within her cleavage, her arms around me, one hand still balancing a plate behind my back. My forehead is right against her bare skin. Now I’m imprinted by the scapular of Mary and a gold horn. She smelled good. Like Jean Natè, baby powder, like a kitchen. She is like a stuffed animal, brown fur dripping down to her ankles, soft red satin shirt on, low cut. She extends me out to take a good look at me again. Pinches my cheek with her free hand. She spits over her shoulder. “God bless you” and then she says, “I brought over your favorite…” This could have been anything she made, and whatever she made was always fried. Filled with sweet ricotta cream or mozzarella and sauce and ground meat. She was beautiful. Her eyeliner was thick. Her earrings dangled. Her lips, deep bright red. Charms cascaded from her wrist. But her hands were covered in burns. She fried food.
J was one of many aunts that dressed up just to bring a plate of food over to us. She felt like a movie star to me. Glamourous. But she didn’t act like one. She acted exactly like who she was, an Italian American mom, aunt, community member. She worked part-time in the office of a factory. This particular aunt was a first generation American, Sicilian American. I had other’s who were born in the old country, but it was the ones that were born here that dressed like Hollywood to me. Dolled up. They looked rich. They felt rich. They made me feel like we were rich. We weren’t.
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A friend I grew up with sent me a reel the other day made by a fashion influencer with a half million person following whose statement was:
“CLEAN GIRL IS OUT. MOB WIFE IS IN”.
I wasn’t sure if she meant that women who were married to mobsters are considered dirty, but her videos describing the look were of her playing dress up: cigarette in mouth while stirring sauce wearing some silks and big hair. In another part of the video she’s dressed up in heels and a fur and a smoke hanging from her mouth and she’s dragging what appears to be a dead body wrapped in a white sheet across the yard to dump it in a pond.
We have officially left the last fashion trend of Italian culture — “tomato girl summer” fashion back in summer. Now it’s #mobwife.
If you don’t know what tomato girl summer is, it’s an in-color version of what these women are wearing below.
It’s contadini vibes meets quirky tomato pattern, big sunglasses and spritz-all-day-against-the-Mediterranean AI generated background.
The photo above — three of my great aunts who were immigrants from Italy and wore clothing made from the sacks that their state-issued flour was given to them in. They figured out how to grow warm climate tomatoes in new-to-them cold climates. They most likely could not read or write.
My Nonna, Salvatrice, also dressed like this, for the first half of her life at least. She started a boot-legging situation in the back of her place during the depression, worked nights and weekends at a wool factory in Niagara Falls, all the while a widow raising 7 kids on her own. She ended up, later in her life, owning a bar and a home. She cursed the priest and cut ties with him and refused to go to mass when he hit my father once when he was ten years old. She did not take shit. She absolutely loved lemons. She made bread every day and gave loaves away to neighbors. She kept, slaughtered and skinned chickens. She carried her grief openly, she missed the old country. She survived a boat ride from Palermo to New York, alone, at age 11. She never went to school, except night school when she was an adult, to learn English. Her marriage to my grandfather was arranged when she was only fifteen years old. She raised her kids solo, after her husband unexpectedly died from pneumonia while she was 7 months pregnant with my father. This was during a time when people from the outside hated her, hated her kids, because they were low-life Italians.
My nonna’s fashion, in the early days of her life, when her proximity to whiteness and the economics of whiteness was much farther away than it became later on, was more #tomatogirlsummer, the OG version. But in photos of her later in life, once she made a little money, and I am talking just a little bit, like being off food stamps, like home ownership, but certainly not of any wealth, certainly not beyond the working class — she changed her look, probably circa 1950s. I never met her, she died a few years before I was born, but I’ve noticed in photos she wore rhinestone studded pins on fake fur stoles. Her hair was piled on her head. Her shoes were pumps, strappy, Photos were black and white, but they suggest her lips were red.
We’ve moved on to #mobwife fashion— maybe because it's winter. Tomato Girl isn’t going to keep us warm. But the fake furs sure will.
If you have never heard of mobwife aesthetic or fashion, just google it. The internet will show you all there is to know, tell you all there is to tell you. But how much of it will we buy into without digging a little deeper?
To describe #mobwife aesthetic or fashion, I want to share a shorthand description of the media portrayal of Italian American women. Marianna McDonald Carolyn write’s in her paper “Italian American Women as Comic Foil:
“Stereotypical cinematic presentations of Italian American women include big hair, pantsuits, lots of gold jewelry, a Brooklyn accent and stiletto heels. Inches beneath the facade of lacquered hair and a tough accent are Italian American women's personal concerns: hair, nail appointments, game shows, soap operas, shopping and sauce. In the world of cinematic stereotypes, the female counterpart to the male mafioso is the bimbo”
In a recent NY Post article, the mobwife fashion aesthetic was displayed using examples of a very famous and current non-Italian pop star being caught on camera in a pale beige leopard print coat. If that is considered mobwife, that is what we (the Italian diaspora) would call mangiacake mobwife.
Nothing in either of these public posts that were sent to me, or any others I saw while scrolling, exemplify what I assume they mean by mobwife. Mostly what I saw was a real carelessness.
Carelessness of a culture, carelessness of a history, that could possibly be reinforcing stereotypes of an ethnic group. But this way of dressing isn’t a stereotype. It’s real.
Mobwife, for me, is just being an Italian American women, in your essence, in your belonging.
You can only really pull off #mobwife by being encultured by Italian Americans.
Otherwise, it may seem like you are only playing dress up. Like a costume. On Halloween.
Being encultured and raised by people who would be considered #mobwife in fashion, I can attest that these women were just being who they were: working class women of the Southern Italian diaspora, perhaps loud, opinionated at times, intelligent, fiercely protective, and the matriarchs of their homes. They went to church and oftentimes to a job. They were mothers and aunts. The were professionals. And they were not always young. This look seemed to get bigger and bolder with age. While most mid-life and menopausal women in our culture get smaller, invisible, the women I knew who dressed this way got bigger, more #mobwife, if you will, as they reached 50, 60, 70. And when I say ‘being encultured’, I don’t mean you have to be by blood. The people that are encultured— through adoption or living in enclaves with them— know exactly what I mean. Encultured means— intimately being part and being raised by the culture. The culture has contributed to who you are. And you honor that.
My position on this fashion trend is that I love it. Not because it’s now viral, but because of the women who raised me. Because of the style they had — from Jersey, to Long Island, to Boston, to Chicago, to Buffalo, to Los Angeles to wherever the diaspora landed and kept their cultural essence alive.
This social media trend is fun and games of fashion, I understand this. I am not trying to dampen the joy this brings outsiders, or anyone. But what are we talking about when we talk about #mobwife? And who? Whose being made fun of?
In many of the posts and reels I have seen where this fashion is being displayed, there is no doubt an element of “making fun of” or creating caricature. The way of presenting this – by fashion industry and pop culture influencers – is a layered misrepresentation that Italian Americans have had to endure since the turn of the century. What is missing is that this fashion is about real women, real women of an ethnic group. Besides the assumption that these women were wives of mobsters, there is always an assumption that this way of dressings is dumb, that the people dressed like this are unintelligent. The word Marianna McDonald Carolyn used in the quote above: bimbo.
We seem to insist on perpetuating the narrative of mob and Italian American as if they are one in the same. Especially when we are telling the story of Italian American women. If you are an IA women not only are you associated with the mob, you are also “not smart”. The only Italian American women archetypes that we have in the media are uneducated old scary nonna and uneducated mobwife. We are much more than this. And also, we are scary nonna dressed in black cursing you and we also are #mobwife, although we are not all married to the mob and we intelligent.
I have a friend who is a professor of Italian at a local university and when she was a new hire, and she sat with the Dean of the school for a group meeting, his first question to her was “are you part of the (her last name here) family who is in sanitation and connected to the mafia?” He laughed– but was serious. Everyone else in the room stayed silent. Even the other Italian Americans stayed silent. She said that for years, until he retired, anytime he’d run into her, he made mob jokes. This is a woman with a PhD from Harvard.
Bill Dal Cerro, who is a journalist who covers Italian American culture was quoted on on Aisha Harris’s podcast “The Godfather: The limitation of Representation*, says “Whenever I tell anyone I'm Italian American, doesn't matter of their educational level - oh, do you know the Mafia? Don't you love "The Godfather?" That's all I get. It's not - I'm not being called names, but my entire culture's being summed up by an image that I consider defamatory.”
As soon as people started sending me posts and reels about this trend, I immediately knew I had to write about it. At first I thought I was writing as a cultural observer, intimately connected to the culture of this fashion style. Now that I am in the writing, I’m getting a sickness in my gut, a weighted down feeling in my heart. Fire at the back of my throat. Grief waves in my ribcage. I am not writing this as a cultural observer, I am writing about myself. My friends and family. This is my story, and their story, too. That’s why, in the whole scheme of things, with a million other heartbreaking issues in the world, this does matter. When does telling our stories not matter? Especially when they are about who and what we belong to.
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When we say mobwife, who do we mean?
Concetta Coreleane, certainly the wife of the major player, who sat quietly, barely showcased in the Godfather. She was subservient, the foundation for the family. Her dress was modest, old country. So are we talking about Karen Hill? A little further down the timeline, not Italian, married to a half breed. She was loyal, spoke her mind, took a beating, but also remained calm and cool as she served the FBI coffee while tending to the children. Her clothing matches the trend, though, not as much as Harry’s goomar. Or are we talking Carmela Soprano? Carmela liked to play a compassionate, pious, do-gooder, but she was a bit performative in that. She’d ignore evil for a new fur. She was as much a boss as her husband. Carmela showed us Italian Americans ladies that we could be modern suburban housewives with old school, old country values in crime. Is that the look we are going for?
Or are we talking about real wives of real life mobsters? Like my friend's great grandmother who was actually married to a legitimate mafia boss, not just a TV show one. Her life was a living hell. Full of fear. She died well before she should have because her living situation was horrible, the definition of pure horror. Her family is still healing from the generational trauma of this.
Or are we just talking about straight as an arrow, blue collar Italian American women, south shore Long Island or somewhere in Jersey or somewhere south of Buffalo, who dressed in furs, high heels, big hair, gold hoops, because that is just the style they liked? No mob connections. No money. Just them.
Or are we talking about my aunts? Mothers, housewives, insurance company secretaries. Who just knew how to tease their hair, fry zeppole, had a closet of fake furs, mirrored walls, marble statues, and plastic couches. The ones who had red horns and Mary everywhere. They smelled like drug store perfume and garlic. They passed down to me their fake gold costume jewelry and taught me how to read the tarot.
Are we talking about me? A 50 year old woman, 75% Italian American, who has always loved furs and gold and mixing patterns (except for that big phase of my life that you’ll read about below) and who loves it more and more as I get older.
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The Soprano’s recently had their 25th anniversary big re-launch, on January 10th, which coincidentally is the birthdate of my dead Sicilian American father, who was a real life bookie. Not a mobster, but indeed was considered a criminal, was jailed numerous times, and made his living from an underground economy until literally the day he died at age 93. He, interestingly enough, would never watch The Sopranos. He said “It gave his people a bad name.”
The Sopranos was one of the best TV dramas ever made, in my opinion. I’ve watched the entire show at least 3 different times, just since COVID. This is the difference between a first and second generation Italian American, I suppose. I loved it, especially for getting our cultural stories out there, regardless of the thematic vehicle. My father wouldn’t go near it, it was too close to home.
My mother donned a very subtle version of the so-called mobwife style. My mom was what some outsiders might consider a “dressing down” version. Maybe because she was from the north of Italy (like Carmela Soprano). Because of who my father was, I think she didn’t want to stick out as the local bookies wife, is my guess. A part of her knew she needed to lay low. But my mother was an exception. I think most of this style is about wanting to be seen.
This fashion “style” aka “mobwife” is what happens when a poor immigrant class with generations of poverty programming finally find a space in time to express themselves in the new world.
Italian Immigrants slowly found some economic privilege on the immigrant ladder, and needed to find a new cultural way of dressing. I’m not a historian, but somewhere around the 1950s this style became very “Italian American”. Think of it this way, IA women finally get to rid themselves of tomato girl summer style (peasant dress) because it really represented such poverty to them and those around them. This doesn’t mean in the 1950s they were making real money. But things were undoubtedly changing for them. They could enter more areas of the workforce without as much discrimination. They could, with very little money the economy allowed them, become flashy and golden. They could dress to be seen.
Those furs were not real. The jewelry wasn’t “real”, the pantsuits were synthetic. You didn’t have to spend a ton of money on this look. And most of the women couldn’t. They were still working poor. But they wanted to be seen. They had a right to be seen. This is a population, a white ethnic group of women with a shockingly low percentage that attend four year college in America. I don’t even want to write it down because I don’t want the number to be true and I don’t want to ingrain any more stereotypes into anyone’s head. But the fact of the matter, Italian American women have been disportionately undereducated in traditional systems.
I think when considering this fashion, we must look at who Italian Americans were living in proximity with as well. I see this fashion sense as both Italian and ‘American’. Who were Italians living with in Chicago, in the southern states, in New York City? Who did they share immigrant neighborhoods with? Especially considering the time up until the 1970s? What other ethnic or immigrant groups did they culturally exchange with?
The co-cultures they were co-existing with surely influenced them as much as they were influential to them. But for some reason, it’s socially accepted to make fun of, and straight up co-opt it, when labeled that it’s Italian American. I understand that “mob” isn’t only of Italian American communities, but for the most part, it’s Italian Americans associated with the mob. As movies have shown, the majority of “made men” are Italian American. I have seen responses from influencers when they have been critiqued come out and say – #mobwife is “not about Italian Americans” – then who is it about? In our media culture it most certainly is. There is no other immigrant ethnicity that is as associated with mobsters as much as Italian Americans. There is no other ethnicity that when an outsider hears a last name that ends with a vowel and that is of Italian origin, hears jokes like “are you connected to the mob?” We have to understand culture and how the media has played and continues to play into it. And we absolutely cannot bypass the truth of this trend— it is directly associated with Italian Americans.
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I have always been part peasant and part Vegas.
I was conceived in Vegas after a Jerry Vale show. You can’t take the peasant/working poor out of my blood and you also can’t take the craps tables out of my marrow. It’s who I am.
But I fought this cultural look for a chunk of years of my life. What I mean is, I did everything I could to go “undercover”. I think is partly my mother’s influence, as she did the same. I tried to hide myself as an Italian American as much as I could.
As many of my elder’s dressed to be seen, for many years of my life, I didn’t want to be seen as Italian American. I didn’t want to be seen as #mobwife. Or the bookie’s daughter. I wanted to be seen just like all the other wasp kids. I was young, but also old enough to understand that economics and whiteness was seen as the equivalent to intelligence in our world. I wanted to be seen as the kind of white and intelligent the kids who lived in the cul-de-sac were whose dads went to office jobs. I wanted to wear neutral colors. I wanted to eat Hostess instead of homemade fried dough. I did not want to be connected to that word: bimbo. Even though I did not know one single “bimbo” in my family, my community. Not one. But I heard what was being said on the outside, I knew how the media was portraying us.
I was the first child of my family not to go to an all Italian American Catholic school (a school started and funded for immigrant families). I went to the public school because by the time I was born, the catholic school closed. I was suddenly socially mixing with a majority of people that certainly didn’t have breaded and fried meals in their lunch boxes wrapped in tin foil. Our home only had Italian Americans in it, socially speaking, for the first decade of my life. So this school, this community, was new for me. My mother did not hang out with the other classroom moms. She hung out with Maria D’Ambroso, who was the wife of Jiggy, who owned the construction company my dad was “employed” by. And Giovanna Favata, who lived two doors up. She was a clerk at the town hall, and her furs were plenty big and in all colors. Her husband played the stand up bass in a big band by night but was a speech pathologist by day, and he had what might be called, #mobhusband fashion. And also kept the most stunning garden in the neighborhood. And Mrs. Collesano, who was the wife of the brother of my dad’s business partner in the bookie business, whose family also owned a hot dog stand that started in the 1940s in the local Italian immigrant enclave, under the bridge.
I tried to blend in my new 1980s environment. I died my hair blond with Sun-In, trying to get that nice blond— but I just turned orange. I made sure I had the latest fashion trends from the mall. I made sure to avoid anyone of my friends coming over to my house, so they couldn’t know the real me. By the time I was 12 my dad had been arrested multiple times. I was called Mafia Princess in 8th grade, and not just by the kids, but also by my history teacher.
My father went through a particularly huge bust that year, and it was all over the western NY regional newspapers. It went “viral” for 1985. Rumors that my father was a mobster were circulating even around my age group— because kids listen to their parents talk.
But my father wasn’t mafioso. He was a working class, 7th grade drop-out, who learned how to hustle very young. My father learned how to run numbers, and was a genius at it, and did that to support seven children that all went to college at the state school. We didn’t have a split level house in the suburbs. We lived on Main Street. We only had one car and one bathroom in our house of 9 people.
My father took care of a lot of people, not just blood family, not just nuclear family — but community family, all Italian Americans. I am not romanticizing what he did, but he was not in the mafia. He was in what people like him had to do– survive. And if there were any ties, or any “paying up”— there certainly were no “pay downs” happening. We didn’t have money. But we always ate well. We always had a roof over our heads.
Italian Americans aren’t a trend. There are people on the internet who want to make us that way. Some of us even from the diaspora, but many of us from the diaspora are working painstakingly hard to tell our true stories, the ones that made us. And these stories are culturally complex, varied, and in many cases, extremely similar. These stories are lived by real people, within a very real culture.
Culture is not a commodity. Culture is what is still alive from a group of people. Culture needs to be storied by the spectrum of those within it. It matters how these stories are told.
We are real people with a real history. A history that oftentimes seems to get brushed under the rug. Liminal cultures, late stage white ethnic immigrants hold complexities that cross narratives of culture and economics. We are white. But we certainly are not Anglo Saxon. We have privilege, but if you look at economics of the Italian American diaspora, you’d see much more of a struggle than for instance, people of European German or British descent. Remember what I said about the numbers of Italian American women that go to college. Oftentimes we get lost in the Homogenous European mix, when in fact, Southern Italy from Naples all the way down to the island Sicily is colonized land — from the Risorgimento— and many of us from Southern Italy are direct descendants of this, which began in 1860 and led to the massive fleeing of southern Italians to the new world. The history of this colonization, like many colonization histories, has been revised. This was not a unification. This was theft.
I wonder if people even know who they are dressing like when we decide #mobwife is a hot trend. Is it pretend movie and TV characters or real life people with struggles and difficult history? A history that often gets very absorbed into a collective one that does not represent it well, or at all.
There are reasons why we are the way we are.
There are also reasons why people always want to be like someone else.
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The infamous fashion choices of Italian American women, in my experience, in part, come from their response to wanting to be “just as good as anyone else” (anyone else meaning Anglo-Saxons or those who we were told to try and assimilate into/within).
These Italian women, their last names, the side of town they lived on, the smell of fried foods literally embedded in their lives, their “weird to Protestant” religious traditions and rituals, and their historical economic and social status, created a strong sense of self-determination, without a doubt. They had to cultivate a sense of pride so strong to survive.
But also, it did create a cultural self consciousness.
This isn’t something you’d know right off the bat, because Italian American women are known for taking no shit and are some of the strongest women I’ve ever met. But I also have witnessed enough to know, there was an inner programmed dialogue of “not as good as' ' — they were told over and over again they were not. This is historical. Look at propaganda from the turn of the century (WOP, Guinnea, Dago, savages, uncivilized… bimbo) until many years after WW2 (when many Italian Americans were taken and detained for being fascists). Embracing a quality of fashion that can represent a new phase in your cultural existence was necessary. It’s a both/and. We are a part of you. And also, we are happily different.
When you can finally show up in a full length fake fur, and a big old gold horn around your neck and 13 charm around your wrist, and to have your hair professionally done-up, you were going to do it, and you were going to show it off. And this isn’t just Italian Americans, it’s any culture that has been economically marginalized (for however long) As Jay-Z says: "If you grew up wit holes in ya zapatos/You'd celebrate the minute you was havin' dough".
I might say that in some way it’s both the subverting of an upper class along with an aspirational desire to be part of it. It’s a paradoxical sentiment that you see within any immigrant culture needing to assimilate into the dominant one. And ultimately— who takes these fruits from this paradoxical sentiment to market? Another way to ask is, who makes the money from mob wife trends, or cultural mob trends in general, or the trends off any culture? Whose going to the bank?
Mob wife aesthetic (as in the real dress) was partly reactionary and symbolic of the exclusion of Italian American women in society, how they were received for many decades by the Anglo Saxon middle and upper class— and in my town, even the poor whiter-than-us people hated us. In some ways, the way we dressed was an economic coping mechanism and a messaging that within a real class struggle — but that they were going to “move up” on the immigrant hierarchy.
I wonder why this cultural fashion sense, mobwife, is now a trend. Why do others want to dress like that? What is the pulll? Especially when I heard, with my own ears, my aunts, grandmothers and mothers be described as trashy, flashy, over-the-top, gaudy, slutty, eye rolls and just too much.
Why suddenly, do people want to look like those they were conditioned to make fun of? To think less than?
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I also wonder what we are so nostalgic for.
I have had to stay off social media while writing this, because I needed to clear my head around it, but also to avoid in general, the Italian Americanness fast culture of reels and TikTok, from slow Italian food, witchcraft, folklore, and ancient culture — all being boiled down to 30 seconds. And many times being created and delivered to us by people who have little idea about the history or culture, and are not even a part of it in any way.
It almost feels like this: nobody saw us for decades, and then we were all mobsters and #mobwives, everywhere we went, whether we were professors or accountants, we must be part of the mafia. And now everything amazing and beloved about us is being portrayed in a less than one minute reel. Our food, our architecture, our spirituality, our history, etc.
But beyond all this, and this fashion trend, the incredible amount of mob-themed and Soprano memes that are circulating right now are overwhelming (and oftentimes genius, I will admit). It’s like the internet has become extra obsessed with Italian Americanism. This feels weird to someone in the culture. There is some pride, for sure. Because I belong to these obsessions. Most of us within the culture are obsessed with it as well. But there is also that feeling that the world is still telling us who we are, and trying to make a dime off it.
I wonder if deep down, there is a lost sense of belonging that people are looking for that Italian Americanism offers, feels like to them? Are we looking for a sense of cultural protection of some kind, the kind only a Tony Soprano and Carmella can offer us? Are we conjuring up this energy because it’s so needed now?
It may be just a general nostalgia for the 90s, a slightly subtle fucked up time that came before the really bad times. We are wishing for a time again when grown men could casually hang outside porkshops, pinkies raised, sipping espresso, while someone sawed up a human in the back room.
Maybe we want to bring back fantasies of a time when we could dream of owning a fancy home in the suburbs on only a humble “waste management salary”.
Do we just need a more gangster culture with hot Italian American women with brassy black-turned-blond dyed hair at the forefront? Is our straight up old country rebelliousness envy worthy?
These times may very well demand a rise in old school mobsters energy that run the streets, take care of business, and redistribute money to the community. I know the cinematic mobsters are tough guys, murderers, and wife beaters. But the men I grew up with? They may have seemed like the type of men being stereotyped on cinema and TV, but they were protective, generous, tender, men. They cried. They cuddled babies. He watched cartoons with me every moring as a kid.They raged, yes, for sure. But they also were as nurturing as they come. My father, at age 80 washed, blew dried, and brushed my 7 year old daughter’s hair when we would visit. He’d rock my babies to sleep and look at them with tears in his eyes. After that he’d make a massive platter of fried potatoes, onions and peppers for lunch. He’d leave the house at 9pm and didn’t return home until 2am. But he may have a cream pie with him when returned. And if you messed with any one of us, I honestly don’t know what to tell you. We’d purposely keep things away from our fathers, collectively, because you’d never know what they’d do. All these truths existed in these complicated men. And the women, even more so.
Or are we subconsciously trying to invoke the original mafia, the real ones? The birth of the mafia in Sicily was complex, but in short, it could be originally seen as an uprising movement of rebels fighting for land rights. Sicilian people lived in extreme poverty. They were exploited by the ruling class. Bandits were born from these very devastating conditions. The mafia consisted of people who were the children of exploited land workers. And then, as time moved on, those bandits became powerful. And power hungry. And eventually they were bought out by the ruling class to control the people. And then, the mafia is born. There is nothing romantic about the mafia in Sicily, not in recent history at least.
Here are some very G-rated images of the mafia museum in Palermo. I chose not to post the other ones I have. The ones where a Mafia boss in Sicily skinned his own son and hung the skin outside the home of his mother. His son refused to join the Cosa Nostra, and actually was an activist against it. His father saw no boundaries in making his point to when someone betrayed him.
Are we trying invoke how Italian American’s “do” family? How family isn’t nuclear to them? Italian Americans have been the token white underdogs who somehow kept their new world culture thriving while also finding somewhat economic success due to their proximity to whiteness. Are people jealous of that? Our belonging? Are we the white ethnics that have somehow still kept our cultural belonging alive? And that is appealing?
I think everyone just wants to belong. I get it. But who is it that you really belong to?
A friend messaged me while I was in the middle of writing this essay, I was chatting with people in the diaspora about it all, and she poignantly said it:
“There are two kinds of people. Italians and those who want to be them.”
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I don’t need to list all the other things Italian Americans are besides “mob”— it really should be obvious. Like so many people of the world, we bring our own version of brilliance and genius to film, literature, music, food. We’ve laid bricks in major cities, mined minerals in dangerous mines, and lost fingers in factories.
If I have to list all the things we are, it would take up all the space. Although everything we have been, and especially those who came before us— has certainly contributed to whom we have become.
I believe we all are our ancestors. And that we express all the ancestors within us. And one of the reasons why we dress this way is because we come from a long line of bling. I have heard the argument that this style has nothing to do with Italians, as in people who live in Italy, and did not have this disconnect as those of us from the diaspora did. But I disagree. I believe it's directly connected to the ancestral lands, and always has been.
Southern Italians are a liminal people. And Sicilia, especially, is a liminal island. It has always been the crossroads of the Mediterranean. Meaning, it was conquered by people from the north, west, east and south. And as much as Italy owns and controls it now, it’s really not “Italian” whatever that even means.
We are descendants of the Arab Empire. Which was infamous for the conquering, and also their gold drip, gold mosaics, accessible spices, barrels of sugar, and luxurious fabrics. They came with riches and flavors and gold to Sicily. They made us.
We are descendants of Carthaginians, who carried with them extensive riches. Elaborate arts, gold, animal skins, minerals, ivory, ebony, silver. They made us, too.
We are descendants from Normans, Lombards, and Byzantine rules, all coming with their own nobel riches and styles, placed in front of us, reminding us of what we didn’t have, but also what we were worth.
We are descendants of Romans, and they were anything less than flashy bastards.
We are descendants of the Italian Renaissance, Baroque architecture, and mountain Medieval villages.
We are descendants of the Florio Family — who created next level advancements and wealth in a pre-risorgimento Sicily, who brought enterprise and money from all over other parts of Europe to the island. They brought a new level of bling to the island — that seemed accessible to even the smallest spice shop owner.
We are from a place where La Madonna, Jesus’ mother, is publically dressed in black velvet and lace, with gold trim, filigree gold amulets, and is crowned with bright and precious jewels. And then paraded down village streets. Regularly. We are made of this dark and beautiful queen Mother.
And we are descendants of the mafia. This is true. We are made from the history that birthed them, the suffering and oppression they have imposed upon the people. We are also made of their protective fierceness.
We are descendants from people who went from dipping bread into water to dripping with fake gold. Women who didn’t let us go throughout our lives without a deep connection to the Mother and Saints. We come from people who would not let us forget our our magic. And adornment is magic.
We may be directly from poor peasants living in stone dwellings, eating three fava beans a day, indentured, but we are also descendants of royalty, of high art, and of intricate tile work that will make you drop to your knees.
We are born from underground worship sites, the churches and mosques built over them. We are born from a volcano — whose more #mobwife than an erupting volcano?
This isn’t a trend. This is a 2000+ year old history that we carry within us. Still.
And we belong to all these people and they belong to us.
And somehow, we have landed here, now, in all the grief of what was left behind, and we can still tap into who we are. There is longing, of course, being Italian American comes with loss, close loss, we can sense it and taste it, but we also can still channel beyond it, because of it. Maybe this longing, in others, is one of the reasons why we carelessly want to look like someone we are not. And we carelessly want to forget that the people who we are trying to look like — are still here. I understand why these people are all over the internet both wearing and selling this look — and I understand why some people, like Italian Americans, are fighting against it.
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I want to see more leopard print, more fur, more layered chains of gold. I do. But when I see it being demonstrated by non-Italian Americans, especially within a fast moving and commodified media market it cheapens even the cheapest gold hoops. When we see ourselves being played by non-Italians, playing dress up with clothes from our closest and our nonne’s closet- how do you think this limits the representation of Italian Americans to others, and themselves? Who are we then? I can tell you, it makes us uncomfortable. And confused.
How do you think it might have affected us, for as long as we can remember, to be told who we are by the outside world, via early political propaganda posters all the way to the mob movies of modern time? How does this continue to inform how these people are treated in the world. Or any people for that matter? I understand Italian Americans are low on this list — but I do hope our speaking up is also a speaking up for many.
Aisha Harris, notes at the beginning of her podcast* (which I highly recommend):
“How does a beloved movie about white male machismo, one of Hollywood's absolute favorite subjects, also get held up as a stain on Italian American representation by the very community it was trying to represent? That's the thing about the moving image. It puts us, the audience, in the position of being the viewer and the image in a position of being seen. That dynamic can be potent, and it has the power to make us feel good, bad or something in between. This is definitely true when the image is supposed to represent us or at least some version of us. So what happens when that version of us isn't the one we want to see? And what are the consequences when it seems to eclipse nearly every other facet of our culture?”
I understand the longing that people have, their longing to know, to connect– with their own ancestral beauty and wisdom. Everyone must want to represent at least a 2000 year history within them, somehow, and hopefully we can do this in ways that avoid harm others. It can be harmful to people to look online and see themselves being portrayed that not only generate misrepresentation, but lack in any cultural history or nuance.
I understand that we all grieve so much of a loss of a true culture. We are orphans of our original lands, roaming on the lands of other people. Not knowing where we belong. We are all hungry to remember. Our ghosts are hungry to be seen. But what if people found nourishment — instead of in an old trend of negligently taking from others without understanding who they are as a people, and dove deep into their own ancestral “style” — way of being— making sustainable and ancestrally nourished living and trends that are real to who you are, to who your people were. In honor of them.
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Last week I got this year’s fake fur in the mail. It’s not vintage, but it is second hand. I got it off some resell website. Every winter I get a new one. They are always cheap. The cheaper the pieces, the more they connect me to my elders. I slip on some gold hoops with a byzantine pattern imprinted in it. My ear holes are stretched beyond for all the years wearing heavy earrings, but who cares. I pull on some pants that I bought earlier in the season for $20, they are gold sparkle, but the gold fades, like an ombre. I have naturally big hair that my kids keep trying to get me to straighten and smooth out and I am only trying to find ways to make it bigger, fluffier.
I just turned fifty. And just like my aunts, the older I get will only find me with bigger hair, more gold, and even a crucifix hanging on my neck along side my gold horn. The older I get the less I will care about the looks I get at the market when I decide to wear mt oversized shades, gold drip, fur coat, and doc martens (because I am practical in many ways) to do a daily errand in this tiny upstate town I live in. The older I get, the bigger I will get, the more #mobwife I’ll become. On days when I am feeling the going all out vibe, I’ll do so because, yes, it’s gorgeous, but also in honor of these women who came before me. My body, an altar to them. The passage across the sea, the tenement housing they lived in, the languages they lost, the food they made, the joy they brought us, and the way they were still able to keep our ways alives and pass them down to us, to me.
This is the energy of #mobwife. Or should be.
Dress as a mobwife. You should. There is no shame in that. But please remember you are dressing like someone’s grandmother, their aunt, their mothers. Know their history. Learn about Risorgimento. About Sacco and Vanzetti. About the immigration laws of 1924. Learn how to make manicotti. Learn how to grow a tomato. Use your body as a living altar to those who are gone, and to those of us who are still here, actively trying to slow the culture down, share it with as many people as we can, and remind everyone, we can, and do, belong, even in our great longing, we belong.
Xx, MB
Thank you for reading longform. You are a rockstar.
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Resources of interest from writing: