What do Gabrielle Solis, Panera, and Olive Garden all have in common?

What do Gabrielle Solis, Panera, and Olive Garden all have in common? They are the visual architecture of the Tuscan mom trend. Let's talk about why girls want to be Tuscan moms, what these sartorial shifts signify culturally, and what I would tell brands who are listening right now. For the uninitiated, Tuscan mom has been bubbling in culture since at least last year, but it has officially broken containment in the last couple of weeks. And unlike mob wife or coastal grandma, Tuscan mom isn't just a vibe that girls are trying on. Silly as the whole trend seems, there is like some vulnerability to the Tuscan mom. Linguistically references the Tuscan home style that was very popular in the early 2000s. These were homes that upper middle class Americans were buying or building when the upper middle class still felt attainable. Think terracotta floors, suburbia, wrought iron, fake grapes for some reason, warm neutrals that felt like someone actually lived there. Wealthy upper middle class, yes, but not obscenely so. Tuscan home felt like a finish line that seemed reachable. Now, at one point, the general consensus might have been that Tuscan homes represented like a chuggy taste, but Gen Z women are yearning for it. They find comfort in it, they want to live in it. So the question is, why? I think that's where the mom of Tuscan mom comes in. Tuscan mom is not a real woman. The Tuscan mom is a composite of a life that was quietly promised to young women and then revoked without any formal announcement. She's hot, but not in an iPhone face way. She's hot in a way that still feels human. She has money, but not in the kind of way that requires a whole personality behind that wealth. It is certainly not quiet luxury, and simply buy lunch at Panera everyday with the other Tuscan moms. She buys candles at Bath and Body Works without irony. But yes, Tuscan mom might be a little bit tacky, but she absolutely does not care because the internet jury did not exist yet and the ick was not a form of social currency. Tuscan mom could have kids without risking financial ruin. Tuscan mom's life wasn't optimized, it was simply liveable. So I think the superficial read of this trend is nostalgia, but in these social spaces around Tuscan mom, there is some of this like weird vulnerability to it. Most of the girls obsessing over Tuscan mom aesthetic were children in 2004, simply don't remember that life. And from where they're standing, it now looks like a door that shut just before they got there. And now all they can do is long for it ironically. And I think that separates Tuscan mom from every hyper specific trend on the aesthetic hamster wheel. Mob wife was a fantasy, coastal grandma was a fantasy. Those trends were about performing a self. Tuscan mom is almost about mourning one. It's like they yearn for her possibility because at one point she felt possible. It's why the part of this trend that feels so salient is the part of it that also feels so ironic and weird like the Panera, the Olive Garden, the polyester going out tops that are halter tops and in weird like animal prints. Because all that exists, but the aesthetics behind them we deemed to be cringe. So it's not just the aspiration of Tuscan mom, also the ability to be tacky or cringe without judgment. Obviously for the last 20 years, brands have been making their spaces more sleek to signal a sense of premiumness. Tuscan mom is the market sending a clear reply. The girls are longing for this maximalist proto-renaissance spaces that we used to mock. The brands who are paying attention aren't going to ask, how do we look more Tuscan mom, that is missing the entire point. The point is to ask, how can we make women feel like they have to stop performing?