Fashion Sings ‘Soprano’ as Mob Look Heats Up
The new face of men’s fashion, some say, is soft, pudgy and just a tad lumpen.
The eyes are beady, the lips are menacingly curled, the hairline has long crept past the halfway mark of the head. And the belly is recognizable for its unabashedly comfortable droop over the belt.
Sure, these are highly unusual elements of a male icon in the fashion world, where those anointed for deification tend to possess the dimensions of an Adonis. But when you’re Tony Soprano, a likable mob boss on a popular television show, well . . . the rules of fashion can be altered.
And the new style dictum is that the Tony Soprano look soon could be hotter than the stolen cars on the hip HBO show.
“The buzz on 7th Avenue is that ‘The Sopranos’ look is going to be in,” said David Wolfe, creative director at the Doneger Group, a fashion consulting and trend-forecasting company in New York. “Maybe [the show] is going to bring back that Versace style that’s vulgar but flashy and cool.”
The outfits Tony Soprano wears often are from the pricey Italian line Vestimenta, whose dress shirts sell for $210 and whose suits cost about $2,000. But the show’s look is fairly easy to achieve. Though classic Mafia movies such as “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas” flamboyantly showcased exquisite tailoring and elegant, stylish dressing, “The Sopranos” attempts to exude none of that intimidating highbrow chic.
The show, whose third season finale aired last Sunday, centers on a Mafia operation in suburban, middle-class New Jersey, and its characters’ clothes reflect their environment.
Though Tony Soprano and his cadre sometimes appear in sleek, simply-cut suits, they’re also shown effecting everyday glory in ratty bathrobes, jogging suits and rumpled shirts with the sleeves pushed up. Tony himself is most often seen in belted black pants and a loose-fitting polo shirt or a casual bowling-alley shirt like the ones Kramer from “Seinfeld” made popular in the ‘90s. Sometimes, he leaves his retro bowling-alley shirt unbuttoned to expose the white muscle-shirt underneath.
The show’s generic suburban look is enhanced by the highly wearable colors the Sopranos characters are partial to--olive, khaki, black, cream, blue and gray. And the characters look so convincingly middle-class that many ordinary men who watch the show may find they already inadvertently look like Tony or Paulie, captain of one of Tony’s crews.
Stan Gellers, senior editor at the Daily News Record, the leading men’s retail and fashion publication, said “The Sopranos” look appeals to men because the outfits seem comfortable.
“From the looks of the people on the show, they’re very much at home in the clothes that they wear,” Gellers said. “The clothes don’t wear the characters; the characters wear the clothes. The men on the show are very average-looking guys, and the clothes they like to wear look good on them.”
Geller noted that men always have consciously or subconsciously looked to television shows and movies for fashion tips.
“I constantly talk to custom tailors who say they have men who come in saying they want to look like so-and-so on TV,” said Gellers, who noted that the most popular TV fashion role models seem to be personalities Stone Phillips and Bryant Gumbel. “Very few men pay attention to fashion, but it’s so convenient for a man to watch TV, and the clothes are right there, and with enough exposure it sinks in.”
But the trendsetters in film and television shows almost always have been young, handsome or, at least, trim. In “The Sopranos,” where the portly Tony Soprano resembles many husbands and fathers in the real world, there finally is a fashion icon with whom the ubiquitous, less-than-perfect man truly can identify.
“It’s harder to associate with someone like Fabio,” said Edward Steinberg, owner of upscale Pikesville menswear store J.S. Edwards. “How many guys can look like that? But with Tony Soprano, the average guy out there can look like him. Many are built like him--they have a bit of a belly, and they may not be in the best physical condition.”
Some fashion observers, however, expressed doubt that the “Soprano” look would catch on. “It’s New Jersey dressing,” said Tom Julian, fashion trend analyst for the New York company Fallon Worldwide. “It’s so unappealing.”
