Alife & Married to the Mob: Can this Partnership Be Saved?

Jane Magazine has a funny feature in the August Issue called "You suck! (but I love you) (for now)," which riffs off that age-old women's magazine "Can This Marriage Be Saved" theme. The cute thing about this article is that it features Rob, co-owner of Alife and Leah, who as I discovered via an AlmostGirl vlog by Julie, is the leading force behind women's streetwear line Married to the Mob. Here's a snippet:

Shortly after I arrive at their apartment, Leah claps when their 2-week-old Pekingese uses its wee-wee pad. Rob lights some incense. Sitting on the couch with their fluffball, they look like a happy Urban Outtitters Christmas card. You’d never guess that just a few days earlier, Leah threatened to spend the night in her office because, as she says, “Rob doesn’t have my back.” The issue actually dates back a year and a half, when Leah got into a fight with a friend at a party (1 was going to beat her ass”). She still hasn’t gotten over Rob’s harsh response. “Leah was acting like a crazy animal,” Rob claims, so he ended up having to drag her away.

“You’re an asshole, you’re a real asshole,” Leah says. Thirty seconds into filming and they’re already at war Rob says, “I’ve stood up for you before, but that night I felt like it was between two friends—you were talking about some girl shit, and you blew it out of proportion.”

Leah gets louder: “I was upset, and you weren’t even like, Are you okay?’”

“I was trying to teach you a lesson,” Rob says. “If you want to actlike an animal, don’t get upset when I don’t go along with it.”

So can this relationship be saved? According to Jane:

For these two it’s more like, hug it out and start working on the relationship.


Still, the doc says that Leah and Rob will be in “relatively good shape” if she stops attacking him and he starts showing that he cares. Which is great, because they live in a phat apartment and it would be sad if someone got kicked out.

After I read the article, I was further intrigued by Leah and took a trip over to the Married to the Mob web site, where there's also a blog. I was gonna pull an image of her and Rob to go with this entry, but the more I read, the more I thought, shit, this chick just might track me down and kick my ass just for ripping a picture from her site.

No lie, Leah is like a street-thug version of Ana Wintour. Which is actually kinda cool. I love seeing a young woman with a take-no-prisoners approach to not just life, but whatever her hustle may be. Yes, she's loud and brash and confrontational, but she's also young--under 25--and I say, better to get that shit out of your system then to have a midlife crisis that traumatizes your kids when you're 40.

Most important of all, it looks like Leah has a sharp eye. Look through the blog and see for yoursef if there isn't something very tight about this badass chick's take on fashion. On this page of her blog, you can check out a feature that she styled two years ago for issue No. 5 of Animal magazine. Here's an image that yes, I--gulp--ripped from her site:



From now on, I will be keep an eye on this Most Official Bitch and silently rooting on her and her fashion hustle. It aint easy being a tough broad and I hope all the criticism I have to assume she gets from folks who think she should get back in her lane doesn't wear down her moxie.