21. She Loves Me, and These are Her Child-Bearing Years

“I wanna go to Harvard or West Point.” “Well, you might see them on television.”

“Full Leather Jacket” is, in title and A-plot, about a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants-ass leather jacket that somehow fits Richie Aprile, Tony Soprano, and the lanky husband of the Sopranos’ cleaning lady, and thus sets off a chain of chaos and violence that will take us to the season finale. But I would argue that, if it’s about any article of clothing at all, it’s about sweater sets. This is the episode where Carmela manipulates her connections to secure a Georgetown recommendation letter for Meadow, and while I don’t have much to say about the narrative details of that storyline that others haven’t already said, oh wow do I have a lot to say about the wardrobe choices.

(Wait. I lied. I do have one thing to say: Some people have suggested that Edie Falco should play Felicity Huffman in the inevitable dark comedy about the college admissions scandal. Obviously, she would do an incredible job, and it would be a little bit funny, given the way that entertainment media set up a weird Sunday night ratings blood feud between Desperate Housewives and The Sopranos back in the mid-00s. However, why would she spin her wheels like that? She can do anything, yet people are demanding that she should rehash something at length that she’s already done perfectly in a single forty-ish minute episode of television? Come on.)

Anyway. The twinset — a matching (or, at the very least, coordinated and sold as a pair) combination of a knit sleeveless top and a cardigan — was first designed in the 1930s and became widely popular in the 50s. Its popularity dipped until the mid- to late-90s, when it became a womenswear staple again, thanks to Gap’s tyrannical campaign to make looking like the most boring asshole at the country club something to aspire to. While parts of that trend cycle live on today at Vineyard Vines and Lilly Pulitzer, the twinset has largely fallen out of favor since its late 90s peak.

But what a peak it was. While I’m not ethnically Republican enough to wear one without looking like I’m in WASP drag, I must give the twinset credit for occupying a niche that no other garment can replicate. It coordinates with any skirt, short, or pant and functions in any climate; it provides a way to look refined without having to look unfeminine or too feminine by combining the matchy precision of the pantsuit with the softness of knitwear. It’s, in short, the sartorial equivalent of cheerfully saying “what threatening?” in the middle of threatening someone.

So I don’t think it’s an accident that Carmela Soprano means business when she wears a twinset. She’ll wear a suit for a formal occasion, like AJ’s Confirmation, but a sweater set means that she’s decided that an otherwise banal moment — the kind of moment* that would, with no social stakes involved, warrant five gold necklaces and a rib-knit top with a weird neckline — is going to get serious but not too serious. She wears two different ones in this episode: A turquoise set when she faux-casually approaches Jean Cusamano to see if she’ll ask her sister Joan to write Meadow a recommendation letter, and an embroidered black set when she decides not to take Jean’s no for an answer and approaches Joan directly in her legal office.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that Jean wears two twinsets of her own: one when she first asks Joan about the letter over the phone, and another when she tries (and fails) to come back at Carmela with some Big Twinset Energy of her own. We know from season one’s awkward dinner party that Jean looks down on Carm — that she sees herself as occupying a different, better socioeconomic class than the Sopranos, even though they’re next door. Carmela demanding the kind of favor that garden-variety rich assholes request for their children all the time — and having the upper hand as she does it — chips away at Jean’s false sense of superiority. Of course Jean tries to assert her dignity with an aggressively respectable outfit; of course it’s essentially identical to the outfit Carm puts on to do the same.

There are so many good wardrobe moments in this episode — which, of course; you can’t get sloppy with styling in an episode whose main story and title call attention to how people dress. And these moments often provide rich characterization, situating characters in not only their time and place, but also within their relationships to one another at this moment: Janice’s ringlets are animorphing into a stereotypical Aquanet confection as she and Richie become increasingly intertwined. Tony wears a suit to therapy; Melfi does not. And repetitions are just as telling as contrasts and changes: the cursed leather jacket gets passed from hand to hand; Carmela and Jean armor themselves for conflict in the same forceful-but-not-too-assertive outfits.

These resonances underline the idea that most of the conflicts throughout this episode are about the narcissism of small differences — the term Freud used (that’s right, bitch, I had a semester and a half of college and then some) to describe why the people who drive us craziest are those with whom we have the most in common. They reflect the things we hate most about ourselves and/or seem to have the things that are always just out of our reach. Jean resents being reminded that Carmela Soprano is, in fact, part of her social circle. In therapy, Tony reveals that he wanted to punish David Scatino for getting to be a respected member of the community despite participating in the same illicit activities Tony does. And Richie resents that he’s almost but not quite the same as Tony, and keeps pushing himself to excel in in the one area in which he might be better: impulsive, irresponsible cruelty.

*A moment like, say, sitting at the kitchen island alone and sketching AJ’s school picture while listening to Sting’s “Fields of Gold,” which is the most “I have too much fucking time on my hands” shit I’ve ever seen.