The un-trad rise of Nara Aziza Smith

It’s 10:30 a.m. in Beverly Hills, and Nara Aziza Smith wants truffle fries.

“Is that crazy?” she asks me, flipping her freshly done box braids behind her shoulder and adjusting the straps of her white lace midi dress.

We both stick out a bit. On the patio of the Terrace café at the Maybourne hotel on North Canon Drive, the crowd is mostly older, mostly male, mostly white Hollywood-exec types. We are noticeably younger and even more noticeably the only two biracial Black girls sitting for brunch. The patio looks over a pristinely manicured garden. Everything is so perfect, it almost looks AI-generated.

Smith seems to be searching for some assurance that I won’t judge her for indulging in a bowl of fried potatoes before noon. “Will you share some with me?” she asks.

It’s almost cliché to start a celebrity profile with a description of a meal order—even more so when the subject is a young woman. But this is a story about Nara Aziza Smith. Food—the cooking of it, the presentation of it—is why she’s rocket-shipped to viral fame and why we’re here. (For what it’s worth, she ordered a plain croissant and a whole-milk matcha latte to go along with the fries.)

Plus, in Girl World, sharing a bowl of fries is a rite of passage. It’s a signal that there’s a lot to discuss in just a little amount of time, and when it comes to Smith—the 22-year-old South African and German model turned TikTok sensation, mega mom influencer, and certified internet-discourse-starting machine—there’s quite a bit the world has been waiting to hear her say.

Smith is still trying to figure out where she fits amid all of the frenzy. “I never know what to say when people ask me [what I do], because technically, yes, I create content,” she says. “But then I’m just living my life and sharing that with people, which a lot of people do.” There’s an eagerness, almost a girlish giddiness, to her voice that is at odds with the sultry whisper she uses in her TikToks. (She explains that she does voiceovers for her videos from her bedroom closet, hiding from her kids—hence the hushed tones.)

Moments later, a 20-something-year-old girl spots Smith and scurries by with a “Hiiiiii, I love you so much!” and a frantic wave. It’s a scenario that’s happening more often as Smith’s fame has risen; in a little less than a year, she went from just under a million followers on TikTok to more than nine million, not including the impressions and commentary that expand past the platform onto Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and mainstream celebrity gossip outlets like People, Page Six, and the Shade Room. She names Bella Hadid as her most famous follower. (Smith admits she fangirled when she saw the notification.)

“I love when people come up to me,” she says. “There was this girl who had recently had a liver transplant and told me the only thing that helped her get through it was watching my videos. Some people are like, ‘I literally just put your videos on to fall asleep to’ or ‘I know what to make my kids now.’ ”

Smith's videos, in which she films herself making meals, snacks, or even sunscreen for herself, her husband, the model Lucky Blue Smith, and their three children, Rumble Honey (three), Slim Easy (two), and Whimsy Lou (four months), inspire close readings; nobody can quite figure out if she’s in on her own joke. Are they cooking videos, or is it all a vibey Gen Z performance-art project?

The clips are highly stylized, rarely more than three minutes long, and narrated by Smith in that distinctive ASMR monotone. They are filmed against a spare backdrop. Smith is usually dressed up and made up, often wearing designer clothes. In a recent video, she prepares wings in a cashmere Prada cardigan and coordinating miniskirt that retail for more than $5,000. Sometimes her youngest, Whimsy, is on her hip while she’s kneading dough, or tiny hands courtesy of Rumble and Slim peek into the frame. Her from-scratch creations know no bounds; one day it’s a grilled cheese (she made the bread, the butter, and the cheese), and on another it’s moisturizer. Takis, gum, cough drops, Coca-Cola—they’ve all received the Nara Aziza Smith treatment.

The dissonance of all the elements of a signature Smith video is the appeal: The impeccable glam and designer outfit alongside the deadpan narration of an impossibly complicated multihour dish lend everything a surrealist quality. Smith’s creations, after all, don’t come with recipes, and you don’t see them replicated by fans on social media, the way devotees of Samin Nosrat or Alison Roman proudly post photos of their own executions of their recipes. In that way, Smith’s content appears geared toward entertainment more than service, and she seems increasingly aware of what makes them go viral: The wilder and more absurdist, the better.

Moments after we place our orders, a coiffed and suited manager politely interrupts us. “We heard that you aren’t a fan of plain water and prefer your drink with a twist,” she announces, placing a tall glass of water adorned with accordion-sliced cucumbers, lemon, and mint in front of Smith. She isn’t wrong; Smith has posted videos in the past about how she often needs to naturally flavor her water to encourage herself to consume more.

“Can you believe that?” Smith says with a laugh, taking a sip and marveling at the attention that even in Beverly Hills, where stars are a dime a dozen, surrounds her.

It's easy to see why Smith has inspired such fascination. Strikingly beautiful model? Check. Married to Tumblr-famous Mormon supermodel Lucky Blue Smith? Check. An enviable designer wardrobe? Check. Three kids under three at the age of 22? Check. As such, Smith often serves as an avatar for how people on the internet are feeling on any given day. There is little room to be neutral on the topic of Nara Aziza Smith; she can absorb the internet’s glee and rage all at once.

Her TikToks have birthed a universe of memes. Reactions range from the hilariously innocuous (“Can Nara Smith build me a man from scratch?”) to the slightly more concerning (“Nara, we’re begging you for the recipe for homemade Ozempic!”) and the more emotionally bleak (“Making a single fuck to give from scratch!” plastered across a screenshot of Smith kneading dough). And then a lot of stuff like this: “every time i watch her videos i can feel feminism getting set back a few decades like …”

Smith tunes out the chatter that surrounds her, for the most part. It’s something her mother, Joyce Mphephoka-Pellmann, tells me she’s always been able to do. “I don’t know whether Nara realizes how much she’s in the spotlight because she’s still such a down-to-earth child,” she says. “If the world really knew who Nara is—how loving she is—nobody would ever attack her. But it doesn’t bother her like it bothers us. Nara has always been a strong girl. She’s always been able to take out the noise.”

When I tell Smith she trends on Twitter almost weekly, she looks at me imploringly and asks, “For what?” I give her the short answer, which includes everything from her outfits to her relationship with her husband to her effect on modern-day feminism to her children’s unique names. (“Nara Smith can’t name her baby Whimsey [sic] but y’all can name y’all child Brelieghnnn Nayvie Tatum?” Twitter legend Keyon Elkins wrote earlier this year.)

“I don’t have a Twitter account and never have,” Smith says. “I’m not even going to open that door.”

But there is one thing that seems to get under Smith’s skin, and that has to do with how often she is positioned at the center of the “trad wife” or “traditional wife” debate. Coinciding with the fall of Roe in 2022, a subset of influencers who project a cheery adherence to 1950s-style gender roles (cooking, cleaning, child rearing, and serving their man, all with a smile and perfect makeup) has gained popularity across social platforms and generated a slew of ragey think pieces. And while Smith is a young, beautiful mother who makes videos of the meals she cooks for her husband and family, she doesn’t see herself that way.

“That’s one of the narratives that I have a really hard time wrapping my head around: the trad wife, whatever it is,” she says. “You don’t see me getting on a plane, hopping to New York, modeling, coming back—all while I have a newborn—paying bills, filming content, getting my kids dressed. Being put into a certain box, just because people think that I’m slaving away, is so weird to me. I’m a working mom who gets to go about her day in a very different way than [someone with] a normal nine-to-five job would.”

Because what Smith is doing is very much a job, insomuch as it pays the bills and then some. She’s partnered with big-name brands, including Hourglass Cosmetics and Charlotte Tilbury, and she appears in Marc Jacobs’s fall campaign. (In an accompanying TikTok, she “makes” a Marc Jacobs bag from scratch.) Ultimately, Smith is a working model, and it’s a job that practically requires a social-media following—the bigger, the better. The most successful models today have massive social followings and extensive networks. Without the connections and generational wealth (Smith says she “grew up in a household that wasn’t wealthy at all”), her canny command of TikTok can be seen as part of a successful business strategy.

“Nara has really carved out a space for herself and has shown how to really connect with people,” says Raissa Gerona, chief brand officer of Revolve. “Sure, she’s ‘traditional’ in the sense that she’s making things from scratch, but it’s not traditional when you’re doing it so glamorously and you’re making big money at the same time.”

When I prod Smith about the performance of it all–and the outsize reaction to it–she shrugs. “I’m a girly girl. I love dressing up. I love fashion so much,” she says, dipping a fry into our shared Calabrian-chili aioli. “Sometimes my outfits aren’t the most practical, but then again fashion isn’t always practical. That’s what I do. I post videos of me cooking for my kids and my husband. It’s really not that deep.”

A few weeks later, Smith and I reconnect over Zoom. She’s makeup-free and admittedly tired from a sleepless night. Whimsy Lou is quietly cooing on her chest. Since we last spoke, Smith has been accused of lifting some of her recipes and video production style from a South African content creator (she’s denied the claims) and weathered a backlash over that sunscreen-from-scratch video. (Dermatologists, cosmetic chemists, and The New York Times decried the dangers of DIY sun protection.)

“I caught glimpses of [the outcry],” Smith tells me. “The sunscreen video … I just shared what we did. Is it the most bulletproof SPF? Probably not. But with us not having other sunscreen in that moment, it worked. To me, it’s more about just showing what you can do. Does it mean you have to re-create it at home? No.” Smith is representative of a post-cancel-culture generation that has moved past the lengthy Notes app apology to an unbothered shrug. It’s a kind of coping strategy. “For the sake of my mental health, I can’t indulge in that. I can’t keep correcting people or read things and get frustrated,” she says.

Her husband, Lucky, however, gets riled up. “People are seeing her gaining some success from everything she’s doing. If you have someone who doesn’t know you at all and they’re making a video about you online with things that are not true, you can just tell it’s coming from a place of jealousy,” Lucky tells me. “Let’s call it what it is.”

There’s also the fact that Smith is biracial, which further complicates the “trad wife” assignation; the “trad” part also implies whiteness. In a world where so many Black women are still fighting the notion that we can’t have the husband and the house and the babies and the career—well, then there’s Smith, an embodiment of the “soft life,” or a lifestyle that prioritizes comfort over hustle, at the age of 22.

“I’ve never really thought about it to that extent because all I am doing is just sharing my life with people and being me,” Smith says, referring to whether or not her Blackness has affected her platform. “But I got this DM from a mom once who told me her daughter loves watching me. The daughter was mixed too, and her mom was saying that she really liked seeing someone who looked like her doing those things. To me, it’s all about just putting what I love out there, and whoever can resonate with that and take something away from it—that’s what I want to do.”

Looking at Smith outside of my phone screen and seeing her as a person rather than a deified or vilified social-media phenomenon, I’m reminded of being 22. Social media existed, to be sure, but it wasn’t the way it is for so many from Gen-Zers like Smith. Sharing their lives online is the air they breathe. “I could never go off the grid,” Smith tells me. “Sharing my life and doing this is so fulfilling.” You can hear the excitement in her voice when she contemplates what comes after this moment. She has projects to oversee and collaborations to consider, and she says a cookbook is very likely on the way. “I’m just here living my life,” she laughs. “I’m just a girl.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CLARA BALZARY; STYLING BY CAROLINE NEWELL

This article first appeared in harpersbazaar.com in August 2024. 

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