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IMAGINE THE SCENE: you’ve woken up to your children asking if they can have cereal for breakfast. It’s 7am and you’re heavily pregnant. Do you throw some Nesquik in a bowl and be done with it? No, you put on your silk dressing gown, apply a full face of make-up (smoky eye included) and style your hair into the perfect ‘clean girl’ bun before heading to your immaculate kitchen to get started on a fresh batch of baking. You rustle up two types of cereal, chocolate chip cookie and cocoa puffs, from scratch. The whole thing appears to take no time at all, and somehow there is no mess anywhere at any part of this process, no ‘hangry’ screaming toddlers distracting you every 10 seconds, not even a hair out of place. Welcome to the life of 22-year-old Nara Smith, a model-turned-influencer and the internet’s latest ‘Trad Wife’ hero.
TikTok’s traditional wives are the US equivalent of stay-at-home mums, but with a twist. Far from the modern housewife fighting to legitimise how hard she works, Trad Wife influencers intend to make child-rearing and homemaking seem easy. They embrace old-school gender roles with a smile that never falters, and their followers endlessly celebrate them as ‘real women’.
Nara (@naraazizasmith), who has two children under three and a third on the way, currently has 2.3 million followers and her viral videos have amassed nearly 100 million likes. To be clear, she’s never self-identified as a Trad Wife – the internet has just claimed her as one. She’s even made the disclaimer that she cooks for her family because it’s her ‘love language’, not because it’s expected of her, but nevertheless her content neatly fits into the Trad Wife trifecta of virality: a beautiful, groomed, tranquil woman in an impeccably clean kitchen, making every meal from scratch, while well-behaved children play patiently in the background.
In the occasional video, you’ll see her husband pop in to caress her pregnant belly. He happens to be Lucky Blue Smith, 25, who Millennials will remember from his meteoric rise to modelling fame in 2015, when his platinum blonde hair and bright blue eyes forged an obsessive fandom on blogging site Tumblr. Now, his TikTok content consists of styling videos, romantic montages of him and Nara (sometimes sponsored by Calvin Klein, of course) plus mornings spent reading scriptures from the Book Of Mormon.
That’s the other factor here: religion. While not all Trad Wives are religious, many are Mormon or fundamentalist Christian – religions that promote traditional gender roles. So too is Hannah Neeleman, the perhaps unintentional queen of the Trad Wife charge, known as @Baller
