“Who like to walk around in long robes”
Watch out for the scribes. They like to walk around in long robes, to receive greetings in the marketplaces, and to have the chief seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. (Mark 12:38–39 BSB)
What it sounds like today
'Long robes' sounds like dignified religious dress, nothing to criticize.
The cultural key
Phylacteries are tefillin: small leather boxes containing Scripture passages, bound to forehead and arm at prayer, a literal enactment of Deuteronomy 6:8 ('bind them as a sign on your hand'). Making them broad turns a devotion into a billboard; likewise lengthening the tzitzit fringes (the same tassels the sick woman touched, Numbers 15:38). The 'best seats' faced the congregation; marketplace greetings were graded honor rituals; 'rabbi' means 'my great one.' Mark's list has no phylacteries or fringes, which his Gentile readers would not have recognized. Instead: the stolē, the long flowing robe of the scholar, a status garment unfit for manual work, announcing that its wearer never carries, hauls, or kneads. Same costume critique, translated wardrobe.
Recovered meaning
Each item is a genuinely good practice inflated into costume, piety cut for the audience. The critique is sizing, not the practices: devotion worn a size larger than the devotion it contains.