A soft voice, a $2,000 runway outfit, a video that begins with “My husband has been craving the most random thing.” If you’ve spent any time on TikTok in the past three years, you’ve almost definitely heard this intro, and the infamous influencer behind it: Nara Smith.
The queen of “from scratch recipes” and wearing designer outfits while baking, Smith made a sudden rhetorical pivot in a recent interview: she rejected the label of ‘tradwife.’ In the interview, she pulled up the flat definition of tradwife online to explain how she isn’t one. She said she is a working mom who cooks because she loves it, not because she is obligated to. One of the most prominent ideals of being a tradwife is that the husband is the sole breadwinner, which clearly isn’t the case with Smith, as she has made $7.5 million in the past year, compared to her husband’s estimated $600,000-$1 million. But to her audience, this technicality feels false.
Her recent efforts at distancing herself from the title are only because the working class has co-opted the tradwife as a mainstream aesthetic. Now that tradwifism is no longer an elite status symbol, Smith is no longer interested in being part of that club. We should take her public rebranding as a signifier that she, like so many so-called influencers, isn’t really trying to influence people or circulate an aesthetic; she is trying to be an aspirational but unreachable character veiled in a shroud of money.
When Smith first got on TikTok, she was a standard fashion creator who posted a couple of day-in-my-life videos. Before she blew up, she didn’t have the soft voice, the perfect life or the blown-out hair. Instead, she talked about her vacations and spoke in a normal voice. The pivot occurred in January 2024, when a video of her making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from scratch went viral. Recognizing the internet’s insatiable appetite for domestic performance, Smith’s videos gradually shifted: She donned floor-length floral couture and a soft voice while narrating her completely organic, homemade cooking processes, often with her husband — even including homemade sprinkles and sunscreen. She leaned into the aesthetic framework of domesticity, explicitly marking a video with #tradwife in her early days.
Smith cannot condemn the tradwife label while, at the same time, exemplifying it through aestheticizing domestic life. Her rejection of the title right now isn’t that abnormal — people’s lifestyles and beliefs can change with age. The real question is why she says she was never a tradwife in the first place.
The answer lies in how the tradwife aesthetic has mutated. While the tradwife phenomenon originally came to prominence following COVID-19 and pandemic lockdowns, it achieved mainstream status through figureheads like Smith and Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm. Both Nelman and Smith’s promotion of domestic life resembles that of the 1960s: propaganda for women to return home and leave the workforce.
If her 1960s housewife-esque attire and demeanor doesn’t convince you, then maybe the old-money outfit and Elvis haircut of her husband, Lucky Blue Smith, will. Or turn to the fact that she had four kids before her 25th birthday, got married at 18 and had her first child at 19.
I mean, just look at Smith’s clean, elaborate dress. She looks amazing while cooking and taking care of four kids: we never actually see her doing the hard or gross manual labor that comes with being the primary parent in a household. We never see the children’s tantrums, messy playrooms, diaper blowouts or the disgusting scenarios only moms of multiple kids could think of. This isn’t because she doesn’t have those issues; she just doesn’t show them. Her career is built around viewers who are tasked with striving toward a goal that may not be financially achievable: Usually, only the members of the upper class can afford for a parent to stay home and buy high-end, organic, whole ingredients. Tradwife influencers continue to gross around seven to nine million each year. Smith is in the top 2 to 3% of all working Americans; this places her among the ultra-elites.
By 2026, tradwifism has seeped into our consumer economy, altering people’s spending habits. In the last year, the number of tradwives, stay-at-home wife and girlfriend content creators, has peaked. But these are individuals who aren’t necessarily cooking on white marble counters with couture. Now, when you look up ‘tradwife’ on TikTok, there are a range of young women with similar lifestyles performing a less couture version of tradwifism — some in the same $40 Target milkmaid dress. They talk about how they are stay-at-home tradwives whose husbands make $17 an hour, and how you can be one just like them.
Following this turn, Smith said on “Call Her Daddy,” “I don’t think a Tradwife would be cooking in Schiaparelli.” Her attempt to rebrand isn’t coming from a change in her traditional values, but because the tradwife aesthetic is no longer a means to social capital. Too many women are now including themselves under the tradwife umbrella term.
Tradwife is no longer its own class, which is exactly what marked Smith’s departure from it. She and influencers like her want to be unique individuals with their own (rich) aesthetic. We need to view influencers differently, or maybe even redefine the title entirely, because most influencers aren’t trying to influence us to live like them. Take Smith as an example that influencers never cared about you. Instead, they’re producing content to further distance themselves from their audiences.
Makayla Tracy PZ ’30 is your go-to person for being chronically online.
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