In a blink of an eye, the quarter of 2024 has passed, and during this period, I believe you must have heard such a style hot word - Mob Wife. It's a Mob Wife. It's a mob wife. It's a mob wife. The Mob Wife style is in sharp contrast to the old money style and quiet luxury style popular in the previous two years. Since the beginning of this year, it has quietly swept the home page of major social platforms.

It first rose in overseas Tik Tok, a crowd of online red bloggers have flocked to. The craze of being a Mob Wife provoked by them quickly fermented in a very short period of time and gained more than hundreds of millions of page views.

As a result, a series of gangster women's visual image collocation rules have gradually become the aesthetic "benchmark" for girls in the early spring of 2024.

When you think of Mob Wife style, what comes to mind?

Painted with strong red lips, she always wore a luxurious leopard-print fur or black leather coat, with a sexy sheath dress underneath, paired with see-through black stockings and a pair of high heels. And, of course, huge black sunglasses and wildly exaggerated metal accessories. These elements constitute the most classic image of the gangster woman in their impression. In fact, when it comes to the Mob Wife trend, it cannot be separated from the classic American TV series The Sopranos. This is a popular set of television series reflecting the Mafia theme in the United States in recent years, with high ratings and influence in the United States and even around the world, "The Sopranos" has also become a frequent winner of the Golden Globe Awards and Emmy Awards.

It began airing on HBO in 1999 and became an instant hit. The series has won 74 awards and 173 nominations, including five Golden Globes and 17 Emmys.

Why mention "The Sopranos"? This is because they recently marked the 25th anniversary of their release, so they arrived in Tik Tok and started a series of marketing campaigns.

As a result, many netizens are also interested in the wear of women in gangster dramas while revisiting the play. Internet celebrity bloggers have also followed the trend, creating a series of dress templates, the women's looks in the show, and thus reaching an unprecedented viral spread. Suddenly, celebrities and supermodel bloggers followed suit. They all wear it in the street style, such as we are familiar with Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Dua Lipa and so on, are the undoubted fans of the style. Some netizens even joked that Justin Bieber looked like he carried his bags while standing next to Hailey Bieber.

In fact, there is evidence for the popularity of Mob Wife trends. Li Li, played by Xin Zhilai in "Flowers," for example, is one of the most emotional female characters in the show because of her unrestrained, strongwoman style. Early last year, there is also the "Crazy" in the "Gao Ye played Chen Shuting, also confident and dazzling. These impressive characters, to some extent, are in line with the current Mob Wife craze. Including last month's Paris Fashion Week, Yang Mi appeared at the Loewe 2024 Fall/Winter show in a fur collar black leather coat.

Outside of street photography, Mob Wife also affects the show, such as the just ended 2024 Autumn/Winter fashion week, including Versace, Saint Laurent and other shows, the models have a great attitude and aura, presenting a sharp female boss image. After the visual circle, businesses with goods also continue to make efforts to earn young people's money and catch the express of The Times of "social marketing".

From the perspective of the simplest visual language system, the image of Mob Wife is often a woman with both beauty and means, strong and powerful and ambitious, which seems to become a visual symbol, just mapping the spiritual needs of today's women. In addition, today's young women are also eager to express themselves boldly through clothing, which has also accelerated the popularity of Mob Wife style to some extent. Indeed, compared with the trend of sexual indifference, Clean Fit, old money, and quiet luxury in recent years, the Mob Wife trend is more stimulating and can form a sharp contrast with the former in terms of self-style communication.

Such an aesthetic is exactly what the market wants, so businesses have also planned a series of aesthetic marketing under the era of capital. Many platforms even carry the slogan "The Clean Girl is dead, now is the age of Mob Wife". And what are we really talking about when we talk about "Mob Wife style"?

In a recent article, The New York Times explained why gangster movies of the past needed to have a woman at the side of the boss: even if she was powerful herself, the gangster wife was an appendage to a more powerful man - her sex appeal, beauty and style reflected his power returning to him." In other words, a woman dressed like this is indeed dangerous, untouchable and aggressive, and she is indeed synonymous with luxury, bold and flamboyant style, and reveals ambitious and confident sex appeal. - But that's also because she's a big man's woman.

In the old movie scripts, there's nothing wrong with that. But in the present moment, judging us in this style is enough to undo all the efforts women have made in the past. As netizens say, when we work extremely hard, day after day, we can buy ourselves a nice suit of clothes, a beautiful bag. But now, when we change into these clothes that we have bought with our own hard earned money, we are easily accused of being named by others and become some "big man's woman." Essentially, the term Mob Wife emphasizes a sense of subordination -- they are beautiful women who are attached to men.

And clearly the current women more pursuit of independence, this so-called independence, in addition to the economy, more, as well as the ability to think independently, do not drift attitude.
More importantly, each specific popular aesthetic, in fact, represents the most primitive spiritual needs of human instinct - the human characteristics reflected behind the style, is the need and yearning for social identification. The aesthetic marketing in the information age takes advantage of this "yearning", distorts it, imposes and penetrates the male-dominated social ideology on us, and then shapes the aesthetic model of "Mob Wife" through the visual impression of social media, which in fact reflects the disregard of the whole female group.

Yeah, it's probably just a simple name.
However, behind it, it is far from a simple name. To some extent, it represents that women have lost the right to choose actively.

Back in the early days of aesthetic capitalism, fashion and style also empowered women - just as Chanel liberated women's bodies with men's designs and fabrics, and Yves Saint Laurent symbolized the rise of feminism with smoking suits.

Why does this aesthetic turn a big circle, and then return to the head of the Mob Wife, but women are labeled with a sense of subordination? So, I would say that instead of dressing like big boss women - why can't we just be our own big boss women?