On Mob Wife and the Renewed Appetite for Real Fur
On Mob Wife and the Renewed Appetite for Real Fur
The backlash to the backlash has finally arrived.
In April 2011, a new reality television show debuted on VH1. Mob Wives promised a rubbernecking look into the daily lives—and occasional fistfights—of the women who love made men. The show followed around several Staten Island socialites as they grappled with the reality of their situations, made salacious through their proximity to organized crime. Call it Real Housewives of Beverly Hill for the gangster set.
The breakout star of Mob Wives was Big Ang, a built, raven-haired matriarch whose cigarette-singed voice was prone to breaking out into bouts of froggy laughter. Her tough-as-nails character and infectious zest for life endeared her to audiences, who turned her catchphrases “money!” and “diamonds!” into a meme.
While Big Ang passed away in 2016, her spirit lives on in the form of a new TikTok trend called “mob wife.” Thanks to a viral TikTok from Parsons student Mikayla Toninato proclaiming “clean girl is out, mob wife is in,” the fashionably-inclined have developed a renewed interest in a slightly-campy version of high glamour.
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Mob wife is unapologetically brash and loud. It’s brazen and artificial. It’s leopard print, gold jewelry, big hair, smoky eyeliner, and acrylic square-tip French manicures. It’s Carmela Soprano, Adriana La Cerva, and Mona Lisa Vito. You can practically hear the chewing gum popping in the background. But more than anything, mob wife is about fur.
Mob wife arrives at the tail end of an era in which it felt like the fashion world had thrown the last shovel full of dirt onto real fur’s grave. Around 2017, basically every big designer outside of Fendi made performative announcements declaring their intention to stop using real fur. At the time, I was working as fashion features editor at FASHION Canada. I distinctly remember the press releases rolling into my inbox and doing an internal eye roll before diligently firing off a missive on the news. I found it shortsighted and hypocritical that the industry had somehow decided that petroleum-based synthetic fibres that will linger on this earth for another 500 years were morally superior to skinning an animal.
But now, the tough-talking, no-nonsense mob wife has come to reopen the debate. Prior to being poo-pooed by the industry, fur hadn’t been that fashionable for decades. (To the point where if your brain is conspiratorial enough, you begin to wonder whether profit margins had just become nonexistent in the fur category and they figured they might as well use a different spin to get some press coverage out of it.) It’s tricky to say why fur fell out of favour, but without giving PETA any credit I suspect it’s because, like anything that was once popular, it began to feel old-fashioned. If your grandma’s version of high style is a fur coat, you’re bound to desire something completely different. But real fur is crucial to the mob wife look, a holdover from the days when men would buy fur coats for their wives as a way of demonstrating their income level and flexing on their peers. By virtue of being expensive, real fur has always been a status symbol in a way that faux fur is not and the luxe element is crucial to achieving authenticity re: the mob wife look.
As we all know, scarcity drives interest and now that real fur has been consigned to the historical dustbin, I’m suddenly noticing more and more people interested in acquiring a (vintage) fur coat of their of their own. There are plenty of good reasons to own a fur coat. They’re incredibly warm, naturally waterproof and they actually biodegrade. There are plenty of ratty fur coats on vintage store racks that will run you between $50-$200 (or more, if you like paying extra for things). And if I’m being totally honest, I feel a thrill of delight being in such close proximity to the glamour and wealth they once signified. Now that a fur coat holds far less symbolic meaning than it used to we can see them simply for what they are: secondhand objects that we can treat as useful or not. We could see an old fur coat as distasteful and discard it due to our moral inclinations., or we could acknowledge that it already exists, there’s not much we can do about it, and along with the supposed 92 million tons of clothing that end up in landfills each year, it’s better to see it be worn, appreciated and loved than not.
Part of me wonders if I’m making this argument simply because I like fur coats and don’t want to feel bad about wearing them. But taboos are always counterintuitive; The minute we’re told we can’t have something, we begin to desire it with a feverish intensity. Everyone’s moral compass is, to some extent, rooted in self-interest. We all have a vested interest in seeing ourselves as good people. So choosing to see fur as “ethical” or “unethical” is a trap because, it just simply is. Perhaps I’m exercising selective empathy here but if we bring ourselves to think about every animal life lost since the dawn of Prehistoric era I’m pretty sure we’d all just kill ourselves out of guilt, and what would be the point of that if everyone ends up dead anyways? Being human is weird and complicated and involves grappling with guilt and shame on a daily basis. I could ask why the life of one mink is somehow more important than the collective future of the planet. Or I could admit that I simply prefer real fur for aesthetic reasons and I’m more inclined to wear it.
For years, I had always dreamed of owning a waist-length brown fur coat to project all my Park Avenue Grandma fantasies onto. I tried on virtually every fur coat I ever saw at a thrift store I could find but none were quite right. Finally, last summer I found the exact coat I have been looking for all along at Common Sort, my favourite affordable consignment store in Toronto. It was $50, but I used store credit so technically it was free. The lining was shredded so I asked my mom, a brilliant seamstress, to reline the coat for me as a Christmas/birthday gift, and she kindly agreed.
So thank you mob wife, for having the fortuitous timing to make fur fashionable right as I’m ready to hop on the trend. You are, literally and figuratively, right on the money.