Nara Smith Was Never a Tradwife

In an interview with the polarizing TikTok star, the "Call Her Daddy" host recalls the first time she encountered Smith's content. The details of the core memory included Smith being in her Dallas, Texas, kitchen from a previous house, and a head-spinning voice-over. "My husband said he was hungry for …," Smith led with, before launching into one of her ridiculous tongue-in-cheek homemade recipes. It left an impression, but it doesn't sound like a good one. Cooper recalls the story as if the video summoned an eye roll to end all eye rolls. Despite the turnoff, the host kept up a friendly banter with the content creator, suggesting she genuinely warmed up to her over time. That is, unless she's faking it, which is entirely possible. It has not, however, done her any favors with her audience of left-leaning young women who see Nara Smith as the epitome of regression: the loathsome tradwife. But Smith is here to set the record straight. Despite building a brand as the fabulous young mom who makes wildly impractical recipes for her husband and children while dressed in full couture, she is not and, dare she claim, has never been traditional. Creating Nara Smith Nara Smith is a model, a content creator, and a businesswoman running a one-woman show. Yes, even after making it big, she stays true to her content's roots: the outfits, recipes, filming, voice-overs, editing, and uploads, she says, are still all done by her. While Smith admits it took some convincing from her husband to realize that she could do this as a career, she also says it was something of an inevitability. "I think [those conversations] happened naturally because I'm a very ambitious and driven and hardworking woman, to where there was no option but to film and get the video up," she said, clarifying that there was no asking for permission. Rather, her conversations with her husband took a different direction that was more like, "Well, got to watch the kids, hun, 'cause I got to film." In an hour-and-a-half-long conversation, the 24-year-old mother of four discussed the influence her grandmother had on her getting into cooking and navigating her 2-year-old child Whimsy's recent cancer diagnosis . But there was one elephant in the room that bore addressing and commanded a large scope of the interview: the tradwife allegations. Before she tackles the accusations head-on, she sets the scene of how and why she even got involved with the peculiar niche of making homemade Takis and PB&Js from scratch, dressed in head-to-toe Schiaparelli. It all started, as it does for many cooks, with an autoimmune diagnosis . After having her second baby, Smith admits she "felt really crappy" but didn't know why. During this time, she was diagnosed with the autoimmune condition lupus , and experienced an eczema flare-up. She described feeling "crippled" by it, suddenly unable to do basic tasks like go out, style her hair, or, to a large extent, use her hands. "The bob also came from that," she added, explaining the shift in her aesthetic, "because I'm like, I can't do my curls anymore." It was something of an inevitability. Having grown up in Germany and only recently moved to the U.S., she found navigating the avoidance of processed foods confusing and, after doing research, concluded she would have to make everything from scratch to be safe. Since this was during the pandemic, she decided to document her cooking journey on TikTok. "That's when the whole situation kind of happened," she said, adding that she decided to wear her fun outfits in the kitchen since she wasn't able to wear them out, a decision that delighted her daughters but that women at large have used as ammunition against Smith, calling her out for looking too perfectly coiffed while laboring to make the most tedious of arbitrary snacks. In reality, Smith's personal style used to be street-style fashion like jeans and a T-shirt. She even claims she told her husband when they were first dating that she was never going to wear a dress. However, trying to film while pregnant and refusing to buy maternity clothes really only left her with one option: dresses. "I felt very feminine during that pregnancy, so that's kind of what I naturally gravitated towards and that kind of expressed itself in the cute collars and the very feminine looking dresses that I guess people connected with different things." Going viral with peculiarity While she may be known to some as the poster woman for the tradwife movement, she describes the snowball effect of her content as originating from very "innocent" and "coincidental" circumstances. "I think there's like components to my content. It's the cooking from scratch, and then there's the fashion and the voice and all of these pieces were born individually." That said, Nara Smith is no dummy. As a content creator, she gets immediate feedback from her audience about what performs well. It became clear that the formula behind her videos was these selling points: the soft-spoken voice, the flamboyant outfits, and the increasingly ridiculous recipes. Smith seemingly confirms as much when Cooper asks, "It's wild to be like, 'Ooh, I just got to get this up, I'm just going to whisper,' but then after that you were like, 'Okay, people clearly like it, now I'm going to give it to them?'" Smith simply replies, "Yeah." The soft-spoken voice was also born of a need to film content while trying to avoid waking her daughter up. Naturally, she had to speak very softly, a video signature that has been the subject of countless parodies. Nowadays, she still uses a soft-spoken voice for her voice-overs but speaks normally when talking directly to the camera. The interview offers a glimpse of how audience feedback has helped shape the now-familiar formula of Smith's videos. When she talks in her normal voice, "people always say, 'You're yelling at us.' I'm like, 'I'm so sorry,'" she says with a laugh. Going down memory lane, she recalls one of her first viral videos. She came up with the idea to make bread for the first time on camera because they had a surplus of peaches and her kids wanted bread and jam. "My kids actually wanted bread and jam," she said, as if the viewers would take convincing. "They love bread and jam." As for why the video popped off? She says knowingly, through a smile, that her narration was something like, "My kids stumbled into my room asking for bread and jam." If you don't live under a rock, you know how the gimmick goes. "And they actually did," she reiterated. "Did it take hours to make? Yeah. Did they still enjoy it and ask for it? Yeah." It's unclear whether Smith gives her children something to tide them over in the meantime or if they genuinely wait for every single hours-long recipe to be completed. Perhaps she's raising children with the patience of saints. Whatever the truth is, it's safe to assume they're not iPad kids. Despite the first bursts of virality, she hadn't quite established a brand yet, and admits she hadn't tapped into the idea that people wanted more of it. Smith says she would sprinkle in this sort of content here and there until she learned the trusty formula. Even after discovering what content performed well and making some money from her videos, she hadn't thought of it as a full-fledged business until the consistent virality and regular brand deals became hard to ignore. After some conversations with her agents and some encouragement from her husband, Lucky Blue Smith, she realized she could do this as a job and have the flexibility of being at home with her kids. The rest is history. Me, a tradwife? It wouldn't be the first time she'd done it, but Smith wasted no time addressing what the discourse around her content usually revolves around: the tradwifery of it all. She told Cooper there was a period early on when she was "very online" and read every comment. "I'd be like, well, this is weird, because I don't feel like that, and my reality is so different to what people are assuming based off the one-and-a-half-minute videos they see." After Cooper goes there, Smith says that people used her as the poster child for the tradwife movement and she found it very bizarre, insisting she had to look up the term because she didn't know what it meant. Her critics accuse her of disingenuousness, but a quick search on Google Trends reveals "tradwife" hardly had any existing colloquial usage pre-2020 and has only exploded in popularity in very recent years, with searches for "tradwife" and "trad wife" peaking in 2024. "Let's Google what the definition of a tradwife is," Smith says when Cooper asks what she found so bizarre about being labeled one. Reading the definition aloud, she goes through it point by point: "A tradwife is a woman who embraces or promotes a traditional model of marriage and family life where she typically prioritizes being a homemaker, a primary caregiver for kids, takes primary responsibility for cooking, cleaning, and managing the household, supports her husband's role as the primary breadwinner, often values traditional gender roles within marriage." Now, heads may roll, but Smith proclaims to the camera, "With that definition and those points, I'm none of that." She goes on to describe a domestic arrangement that is creatively fulfilling, flexible, and egalitarian. She and her husband, both working models who travel frequently, split childcare 50/50, with one parent looking after the children while the other is working. She also acknowledges that they rely on both paid help and family support. While Smith does all of the cooking, save for the occasional seared steak, her husband handles all of the dishes and most of the cleaning. Nor is he the family's primary breadwinner. Public estimates of the couple's finances generally place Smith as the higher earner . She and her husband, both working models who travel frequently, split childcare 50/50, with one parent looking after the children while the other is working. What's happened here is that people saw a woman in a kitchen wearing beautiful dresses and cooking and assumed either that she was religious and traditional with socially regressive views or that she was being brainwashed, if not imprisoned by her husband . Many of these assumptions have been fueled by speculation surrounding the couple's religious views. Despite Smith's husband growing up in a Mormon household in Utah, she herself does not identify as Mormon or practice Mormonism, and it is unclear whether Lucky still has any affiliation at this point in his life. In a 2024 TikTok, Smith addressed the speculation about her religious affiliation, acknowledging that her faith had become "a very hot topic on the internet." "I don't know what I'm doing. I'm still learning and figuring out my own faith. I'm not in any way a hardcore Mormon or anything like that. I don't wear garments. I didn't get married in the temple. Both me and my husband are on our own journeys and figuring out how we want to raise our kids." In another TikTok posted in 2025, she outright says she is not Mormon. "No, I'm not having this many kids because I'm a Mormon. I'm not Mormon," she said, adding that she had always wanted to be a young mom and do everything while she was really young. Smith became pregnant with her first child at 18 and gave birth at 19. Now just 24, she has four children under the age of 6. "I think that's just a personal preference for me. I did a lot of the things that people do in their 20s as a teenager, so I felt like I was ready to start a new chapter." Smith started modeling and traveling the world at 14 and has spoken about clubbing at 16. Some of these choices were shaped by her father's warnings that he regretted not having children sooner. When you're a hammer, everything's a nail "I think there's also a bigger conversation to be had," Smith says, arguing that people have become overly eager to pigeonhole women. "Everything I'm reading online, I find it very concerning, almost, that we need to put women in very specific, very narrow boxes in order to make sense of them." "Why can't we do it all?" she asks. "Why can't we be a working mom that enjoys cooking, that enjoys being at home and taking care of our kids, but also is on the next plane out to L.A. to take business meetings with big executives? Why can't that coexist?" People have become overly eager to pigeonhole women. This is what Nara Smith's critics need to answer. Because despite the Pepe Silvia-level conspiracy theories connecting the dots between the Smiths' supposed religious views or their guilt by association with brands like Ballerina Farm , or rumors that Smith herself embraced the tradwife label by tagging her own content #tradwife (an allegation for which there appears to be no evidence and which seems to have originated from a fan account), the criticism comes down to little more than in-group signaling. What people oppose in Nara Smith is not her political views, about which she has said almost nothing, nor her social views, which are, by and large, entirely in step with modern culture. It is an aesthetic that implies other associations. When you look at Nara Smith's content, the words that come to mind are culture-war fodder: femininity, motherhood, domesticity, soft girl life, but also working mother, model, and chic. She represents, much like Ballerina Farm , the supposedly impossible marriage of two diametrically opposed worlds. Or so they'd have you believe. You know it's a bit, right? If you ask for an actual principled, ideological opposition to Nara Smith, her critics can't give you one. It's not anything she's done or failed to do; it's what she represents, culturally. There's anxiety surrounding women's role in society, and it is imperative for both sides of the aisle that you believe that role is mutually exclusive. Because we have overdosed on discourse, we can only metabolize women as avatars of competing ideologies, as "team girlboss" or "team tradwife," even when these labels don't neatly apply. Women have always worked, and they have always been the primary caretakers of children. Nara Smith is not an anomaly; her dynamic is the norm. What is not "normal" is her wacky content. That being said, it can only be interpreted as divisive if you have no sense of humor or whimsy. When Ballerina Farm cooks and raises her children on a homestead in homely clothes, she's cosplaying as a peasant. When Nara Smith cooks in fabulous couture gowns, designer gloves, and gigantic hats, she's creating harmful standards for women. What is so addictive about Smith's content is the unpredictability, the zaniness, and the hilarity. Whether she's making chewing gum or Coca-Cola from scratch or claiming that her children stumbled out of bed asking for something to eat so she started making something that takes several hours just to rise, people would rather assume a woman is evil or brainwashed than recognize that women can be funny. When Smith makes a joke like, "I don't think a tradwife would be cooking in Schiaparelli or a Moschino straight off the runway," her critics lazily opt for the former, accusing her of calling her critics poor. I see it as a reminder of how she refuses to take herself too seriously, a quality that falls flat on viewers hungry for a scapegoat. Sometimes a girl making sprinkles from scratch in an outfit that would be more appropriate at the Met Gala isn't patriarchal propaganda; it's just camp. While it seems like Nara Smith is ready to embark on the next chapter of her career and perhaps leave the "tradwife" baggage behind her, one thing remains clear: she is committed to the bit. Whether it's launching a cookbook, diving into acting roles, or giving people on TikTok mass psychosis, I will be seated. They don't yet see your vision, queen, but you will go down in history as the Andy Kaufman of lifestyle content.