The start of 2024 is marked by the awakening of a trend that will find its way into both the make-up and ready-to-wear worlds: the ‘mob wife’.
How do you define a mob wife?
“The mob wife is bold, tough, adventurous and free,” Sarah Jordan Arcuri, one of the influencers behind the trend, told AFP.
This style is made up of fake furs, Italian brand prints, skin-tight stockings, leather, vertiginous heels and black. In short, a very 1980s silhouette. The phrase “fashion is an eternal restart” takes on its full meaning here.
However, the mob wife style was perfected by the accessories, with gold jewellery and gold chain belts worn around the waist.
On the famous social network TikTok, the cradle of new trends, there are an increasing number of tutorials on how to reproduce the beauty looks of this style. Charcoal eyes and dark lipstick are at the heart of this preparation.
The muses of this aesthetic are, on the Anglo-Saxon side, Dua Lipa, Kendall Jenner or even Hailey Bieber in a version of this feminine figure far from the “trophy wife”, with a very expensive bag but no man at the end of the arm.
This new fashion is in total contradiction with recent months, marked by the waves of “quiet luxury” and the “clean girl”. Both are synonymous with minimalism and understated chic.
The mob wife invades the catwalks
For Generation Z, fashion is now as much about these hashtags as it is about the catwalks, and the one now even precedes the other. The trend experts at Journo research have noted that “Google searches for +mobwife+ have increased by 2,122% in the last 90 days, while on TikTok the hashtag #mobwife has gained 160.9 million views and #mobwifeaesthetic has received 130.6 million views”.
And luxury fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Fendi and Saint Laurent have also adopted the trend in some recent catwalk looks, including hair and make-up. Clearly, it’s already catching on.