THERE’S A SCENE in the second season of the Sopranos where Tony returns home from Vesuvio with a garment bag. He walks into his kitchen and sees his wife Carmela writing checks at the kitchen table, face affixed in a grimace, which melts away when Tony reveals what’s in the bag: a sumptuous, floor-length fur coat. As she always does when presented with a lavish gift, Carm knows the coat was procured via illegal means. But that doesn’t stop her from modeling it for her husband while naked underneath, a form of mob-wife foreplay that inevitably leads to thank-you sex.
That image of Carmela — sensuous, alluring, lit in chiaroscuro, and draped in the fruits of her husband’s criminality — is, fittingly, what graces the Carmela T-shirt. An homage to the many looks Edie Falco’s character served over six seasons, the Carmela shirt is routinely spoon-fed via algorithm to nostalgia-happy millennials and zoomers on Instagram. Over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve seen exactly two strangers and three of my online friends posting themselves wearing the shirt, including author Nic DiDomizio. “She’s super feminine but also has big dick energy, and is also just quintessential Jersey Italian mom,” says DiDomizio, 33, who loves Jersey Italian moms so much that he wrote a novel, Burn It All Down, about them.
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