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Late one morning, at her family’s home in Dallas, the model and influencer Nara Smith is serving her infant a meal made from scratch. This is what she’s known for: Millions of people tune in to her TikTok to watch her whip up an “easy” snack like PB&J—homemade bread, homemade peanut butter, homemade jelly—which actually takes her several hours to make, plus editing time. Today’s meal, though, is not so labor-intensive: She is nursing her eight-week-old baby, Whimsy Lou. Whimsy is her third child, and breastfeeding is second nature for Nara. Wearing a denim halter dress and no makeup, the 22-year-old is able to pop the infant onto her body and go about her day with the calm ease that, say, Patrick Mahomes might exude while idly tossing a football during a conversation.
“She’s our easiest so far,” Nara says, sitting down on the giant cream-colored sectional in the living room beside her husband, the supermodel Lucky Blue Smith, who has just turned 26 a few days earlier. (For Lucky’s birthday, Nara dressed up in a sparkly gold tube dress and baked him his mother’s chocolate cake recipe, and filmed it for TikTok.) “She just wants to hang out,” Nara says, admiring the placid infant. “She’s starting to smile a little bit.”
Since Lucky and Nara moved from Los Angeles to Dallas two years ago and expanded their young family, Nara has become an avatar for a corner of social media that glorifies old-fashioned family structures and the wholesome, quasi-religious aesthetics of housewifery. Nara’s videos are usually shot on a tiny, pristine patch of kitchen counter, where she kneads sourdough, or mixes the ingredients for homemade ketchup. This morning, their toddlers, Rumble Honey and Slim Easy, are out at the park with a part-time nanny the couple recently hired, but their presence is still felt throughout the house. A collection of toys has been pushed to the corner. There’s flotsam and jetsam around the powder room, and the surfaces and textiles of the living room have been lovingly battered in a way that screams: toddlers. Someday Nara wants to start a garden, but for now, her backyard is brambly and overgrown. Online, Nara seems possessed by maternal and domestic superpowers. In person, she is another woman with a newborn, two toddlers, and 24 hours in a day. “The toddlers are absolutely feral,” she says through irrepressible yawns.
This casual scene is a far cry from the videos that have turned Nara—and, by proxy, her husband—into an online sensation in recent months, a period during which she has racked up over 8 million TikTok followers. Her videos routinely get more than 25 million views. In these clips, she often turns the act of feeding her kids and husband into a spectacle of exaggerated domesticity. In one TikTok she posted in February, she stands at her kitchen counter, heavily pregnant in a brown tank dress, gold jewelry, and a fully made-up face. There are no chips in her long, manicured nails. In a social media landscape filled with images of moms being “authentic,” messy, and overwhelmed, Nara is defiantly aspirational. The version of motherhood she presents is calm, impeccably groomed, model-thin, and luxurious. And filled with vast expanses of time in which to make sandwiches. “When I asked my toddlers what they wanted for lunch,” she tells the camera in a breathy, ASMR-style voiceover, “they both said they wanted a grilled cheese. So that’s exactly what I got started on.” She then proceeds to make both the bread and the cheese from scratch; the video is hashtagged #easyrecipe. In May, just three weeks after Whimsy was born, Nara filmed herself making bubble gum at home for her sister-in-law. “She’s been craving bubble gum so bad since she ran out, so I just decided to make it for her,” she says in her voiceover, deadpan.
Even if you don’t follow Nara or know anything about her, at some point in 2024 you have probably experienced the internet filtered through the absurdist lens of her digital shtick. It’s been a meme bonanza for Nara’s followers, who have remixed her image and routine to absurdity: There’s Nara making a mango Juul pod from scratch. There’s Nara melting ice cubes to make water from scratch. There’s Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis putting Trident sticks in a bowl, with Nara’s homemade gum voiceover playing in the background. When the Smith children turn 16, TikTok has mused, Nara will be at the auto-body shop, building them cars out of spare parts. Nara insists she didn’t plan any of this; she just happened to inadvertently create internet magic by fashioning the sort of joke template that pretty much anyone can riff on. “My TikTok literally started taking off in January,” she reminds me. “Sometimes we can’t grasp how many people watch our content and our videos.” But the Nara Smith obsession goes beyond wholesome internet fun. Her online persona has opened the floodgates of discourse. Tens of thousands of TikToks and Reddit comments have been posted about the Smiths, each with its own distinct flavor of awe, disdain, or tinfoil-hat delirium. Here are just a few of the theories and opinions that the internet has developed about Nara and Lucky Blue Smith: Nara Smith is Gen Z’s ultimate domestic goddess. Nara Smith is a toxic “tradwife” who’s pushing us all to revert to the gender roles of the 1950s. Nara Smith is a fake tradwife, trolling for clicks. Nara Smith is a tool of the LDS church, sent to persuade young people to start following a Mormon lifestyle. Nara Smith is promoting an impossible standard for mothers. Nara Smith is a harmless content creator, just having fun online. Nara Smith doesn’t actually do any cooking or child-rearing—she’s got a team of assistants, producers, and nannies just out of frame. Nara Smith is a fraud who steals recipes—nay, entire lifestyles—from other TikTokers. “What people think online is that we have housekeepers and cleaners and nannies and all of these things, when in reality it’s just me and Lucky wanting a family and sharing our lives online,” she says, and points to a lonely-looking tripod in her kitchen as evidence of how low-budget her content production setup is.
If other influencers make their audiences—women in particular—question what products they should be buying, Nara Smith and her cohort challenge the way we live on a fundamental, existential level. As she lovingly serves roasted potatoes and harissa chicken for Lucky, looking like she is walking the runway for Housewifery Fashion Week, she calls into question several decades’ worth of cultural evolution. The gradual shift away from the nuclear family, the emphasis on careers, the delaying of children until the last possible minute…was it a mistake to label all of that as progress? What if the pursuit of family and domestic excellence is the real path to happiness? What if having three children by the age of 22 isn’t a waste of youth, but rather a way to channel the vitality of your 20s toward finding real purpose and raising a new generation? We are made to wonder: Should we all drop everything and move to Texas and learn to make mozzarella by hand?
“In no way am I saying this is normal or this is something people have to do in order to be a certain way,” Nara explains. “Whether it’s a meal idea, or a home-cooked meal I’ve made my toddler, or my soothing voice, or whatever it is, I just put content out there to inspire people. Everyone can take whatever they want to from my content.”
Anyone with even a cursory interest in fashion probably remembers Lucky Blue Smith’s rise to fame about a decade ago. A Utah native raised in a large Mormon family, he was scouted at the age of 10 and signed to an international modeling agency shortly after. By 2015, before he’d turned 17, he was such a sensation in the fashion world that he appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which was pretty much unprecedented for a male model. His popularity on Tumblr helped turn him into the type of heartthrob who has his very own army of lusty teenage fans; his called themselves the Lucky Charms. He surpassed a million followers on Instagram back when that was a real milestone, and he engaged with his fan base more like a member of a boy band than a model, accruing hordes of followers around the globe, with an especially passionate audience sprouting up in China. At one fan meetup near the Eiffel Tower, 300 Parisian teenagers descended on him, and he left with a torn shirt. At just 19, he had a baby with his beauty queen girlfriend, Stormi Bree Henley, sending the fashion blogosphere into a tizzy: “Someone sign this baby already,” one article read. By 2018, the couple had split.
Lucky’s future wife, née Nara Aziza Pellmann, grew up in Germany to a German father and a Mosotho mother. She was discovered by a model scout at the age of 14. In 2019, she met Lucky at a show in Milan, and the two fell in love immediately. When they got together, Lucky taught Nara how to do laundry; she had never done a load herself. Within a few months, Lucky surprised Nara with a proposal while she was visiting him in LA, and in February of 2020, while Nara was a few weeks’ pregnant with Rumble, they tied the knot in a small ceremony on the beach in California. Rumble was born in October of 2020, and just 15 months later, their son Slim was born.
Despite the titters online about Nara having three children before 23, she insists she’s always wanted to be a young mother. Her parents were 35 and 45 when they started having kids, and she always took to heart her father’s regrets about not starting a family when he was more full of energy.
“Lucky had Gravity when he was really young. It felt like a natural thing: Yeah, I think I’m ready to have kids. When I’m 40, they’ll be 20, and we’ll grow up together,” Nara explains. Then she says something so simple, and so youthfully idealistic and profound that it scrambles my millennial brain a little bit. “I want to build my life with them rather than trying to integrate them into my life later,” she says. “And it worked out great. I love being a young mom.”
The couple gaze down at Whimsy. “She has this grumpy face,” Nara says.
“She’ll get so focused on something that she’ll look like she has resting bitch face,” Lucky says. He takes the tiny baby from Nara’s arms and nestles her confidently in the trough between his thighs.
At just 26, Lucky has lived a lot of life. Now, as a father of four, the boyish physical perfection that made him such a breakout star in the fashion world is transforming into something more manly. He certainly doesn’t have a dad bod, but here, in jeans and a chunky oversized cardigan, assuredly handling this newborn, Lucky can no longer be mistaken for a child himself.
Early in their relationship, the Smiths said they wanted six children together. The realities of child-rearing quickly disabused Nara of that idea.
“After Whimsy, we are absolutely done now,” Nara says. “Having toddlers is the best sort of birth control, because they’re wild.”
Lucky has a dreamier temperament than Nara, and he chimes in to neutralize the sentiment. “We feel like we couldn’t be as good of parents if we added in any more,” he says.
As if on cue, Rumble and Slim storm into the house with the new nanny, a young blond woman who started this gig just two days ago.
“Rumble, do you want to go in the playroom?” Lucky asks his three-year-old daughter.
“No,” she says.
“Guess what we have to do? We have to talk, do an interview,” he explains, as Slim, Rumble’s younger brother, lurches for an iPhone.
“Not the phone, Slimmy. Not the phone,” Nara instructs.
“Poop!” says Slim. “I did poop.” Sensing that the transition to the playroom might be a two-person job, Lucky offers to help the nanny and slips upstairs with the kids.
With the couple’s three young children, a booming social media business, and modeling careers that routinely require international travel, it’s easy to imagine a carousel of nannies, assistants, housekeepers, personal trainers, producers, and editors managing the Smiths’ day-to-day. But with the exception of the nanny who helps out a few hours a week, they seem to do the brunt of it themselves. In fact, they relish it. Every night before bed, Lucky and Nara review their upcoming work obligations and map out a childcare plan for the next day. Oftentimes they will divide and conquer, with each parent taking the kids for half the day and working the other half. In other households, a typical parent might spend 90 seconds making lunch for their kid. But for Nara, preparing a sandwich from scratch, filming the process, and then editing the footage can take up to seven hours. (In the meantime, her children will actually be fed something easier, like oatmeal.) Being a mother really is a full-time job, especially when you’re documenting it for 8 million followers.
At one point the scrutiny from those followers got so loud that Nara was compelled to add disclaimers to some of her videos, lest anyone suspect she was trying to promote a life of servility to her husband. “It’s not so much about: Oh, I need to make my husband a meal right now, or else he’s going to be mad,” she says.
“I view our situation as a big partnership in every aspect of our lives,” Lucky says. “When she has all these meals she’s cooking…”
“He does cleanup,” Nara says. “Which I’m grateful for, because I hate that part.”
At the end of 2022, Nara and Lucky decided they wanted a fresh start. They were feeling like they’d outgrown Los Angeles. So they moved to Dallas in search of a clean slate and a way to save on state income tax.
“It was such a random choice,” Lucky admits. He looks to Nara. “You moved into my life in LA and it didn’t feel like we were building a life together. We thought, Let’s just try it.”
“Also, your parents lived here for a while,” Nara says, “and they were always raving about how great Texas was for them.”
“I don’t know what they were raving about, personally,” he says.
Life in Dallas has been alienating. They’re far from the major fashion cities, and also far from the kind of young families they’d be at home with socially.
“For me personally, it’s hard to make friends,” Lucky says. He has a soft, plainspoken manner that takes on shades of sorrow when discussing some topics. “We’re a young family, and a young couple, and there aren’t a lot of people in Texas that I know of who are in our position. It’s hard to relate to someone who isn’t in your same phase of life,” says Lucky, before mentioning the alternative: “Whereas if we went to Utah, there are tons and tons of young couples and young families.” He begins to shake his head, signaling how unlikely it would be to return to his home state.
Nara starts to laugh at the mention of Utah. “That doesn’t seem like something I want to do,” she says. I suggest that she could become the next Hannah Neeleman, the Juilliard-trained ballerina turned homesteader and mother of eight, who now has 9 million followers on Instagram under the name Ballerina Farm. She’s at the heart of the tradwife internet, filling the minds of millions with idle fantasies of a rustic lifestyle filled with farming, baking bread, and raising a gaggle of children.
“No,” Nara says, laughing. “Not really. But I do love watching her content. It’s amazing.”
Lucky seldom discusses religion, but last year he posted a video assuring his followers that “God is right there…he has his hand out, just waiting for you guys to grab onto it.” Nara, too, will sometimes include Scripture study in videos about her routines but rarely gets into the nuts and bolts of her faith. She’s aghast at the idea that she could be some kind of Mormon propagandist, as so many truthers online would like to believe. “What do you mean? What do you mean?” she wonders when she watches these videos. “I’m definitely not doing that. Everyone’s religion and faith is something so deeply personal to them, that I would never want to put something out there for people to follow. I never have, and I never will. That is crazy to me that people think that.”
Until very recently, Lucky and Nara maintained a low profile. While the frenzy of Lucky’s teenage years had calmed, his modeling career had evolved to the point where he could work less and spend more time with family—while remaining one of the faces of major brands like Ralph Lauren. Nara was booking gigs and doing influencer partnerships, but they could mostly go unnoticed while out and about. Back then, Nara was posting more broadly-conventional lifestyle videos. Plenty of people wanted to know what this extraordinary glamorous young mother cooked, or put on her skin, or filled her early morning hours with. She did love cooking, and knowing exactly what was going in her food. (Lucky suggests this is a European mindset.) Still, she was indistinguishable from the masses of exceptionally attractive people sharing their morning routines or favorite moisturizers on social media.
But then, poof: Early this year, after posting a couple of videos with a faint mischievous flavor to them, she wasn’t just Nara Smith, everyday influencer, but suddenly she was the Nara Smith, a blank canvas onto which the entire internet could project its feelings. The noise got louder when the couple announced Nara’s third pregnancy, a fact that poured gasoline onto the algorithm. “People on Twitter had a field day, hating on us. I’d get screenshots of people saying insanely rude things—so hateful, and so spiteful,” she says. “But in a weird way, I think it might have helped?” The followers were flooding in. It didn’t take long for her audience to explode in size, turning Nara Smith into the subject of water-cooler chatter for people under 40 and chronically online.
Did she remember exactly when it happened? I ask her.
“Not really,” she says, coolly.
“I know which one it was,” Lucky chimes in with a smile. He’s talking about the peanut butter and jelly video, a clip in which Nara takes a simple request from her toddler and spins it into an ostentatious show of femininity. Her hair straightened into a pert little bob, Nara is wearing a silky black robe with feathered bell sleeves. “I started by making some really simple sandwich bread,” she says in the whispery voiceover as she puts dough together. While the dough is rising “for about two hours,” she begins cooking down raspberries for jam and roasting peanuts to make peanut butter.
“That was the first video that got really wild engagement,” she remembers. Nara had found her content calling, and she had the haters to prove it. “People are really into the videos, or they hate them,” she says. At one point, Nara filmed a video of herself right after waking up, and her groggy voice accidentally took on the low, flat tones of an ASMR vixen. Her followers seized on it, thinking she’d adopted a new affect. “Some people were like, ‘You don’t have to do a voiceover like that! It’s so annoying,’ ” she says. “But then there were so many people being like, ‘Oh, this is so fun.’ The [new] voice became part of the whole Nara Smith image.” That image—that is, the unflappable maker-from-scratch of all things edible—has become well-known enough as to be bankable to brands: When it was time for Nara to promote a watermelon-flavored lip product, she whipped up watermelon sorbet in her kitchen.
Within a few short weeks of the PB&J video, the Nara Smith image had gone mainstream. Now, she says, “When we go to the malls, it’s insane.”
For Lucky, this whole phenomenon brings on déjà vu. He’s already been through the life cycle of fame on social media and come out the other side, and he speaks about Nara’s ascendance with an air of caution. Nara had grand ambitions to post a video on TikTok every day—truly treating it like a full-time job—but Lucky gently suggested she make herself a bit more scarce, even if it meant starving the algorithm for a bit.
“You had crazy experiences when you were at the height of all of it…. Your meetups, your fans, were wild,” Nara says to Lucky. “You overstretched yourself. You even FaceTimed your fans. You were helping them through breakups.”
“I started getting really socially anxious after a while. You see people taking videos of you while you’re eating, and there are moments where you just don’t want that,” Lucky explains. “I’m curious to see how you will be, you know, in a year or two. It’s a really bizarre thing to experience. You’re just a person. You put your pants on one leg at a time like everybody else.”
Lucky has a way of imagining the parasocial fixation followers have developed with his wife. “If you think of a football stadium. How many people—60,000 or 80,000 people—fit in a stadium? The views you get could fill many, many stadiums,” he reminds her. “It’s hard to see when it’s just a number on a screen.”
Throughout my afternoon at home with the Smiths, I try to sniff out any cynicism in their family project—any sign that this TikTok persona is all part of some overarching follower-harvesting or sinister lifestyle conversion scheme. I ask Nara how deep she wades into the reactions to her content. “Sometimes I’m curious what people have to say about it,” she admits. “But I think more so it’s that I have fun doing these videos, doing these things and experimenting. Making something from scratch, and knowing what’s in my food.”
I ask her about the way the videos are styled—the aesthetic, in the parlance of her generation.
“A lot of people don’t realize that Lucky and I have a fashion background,” she says. “And I love dressing up. I love doing my makeup and looking put together, and I love cooking in cool outfits. That just became a part of my content that people liked seeing. Rumble loves when I throw on a dress. She’s like, ‘You look so pretty, Mommy.’ ”
Nara and Lucky lead me into the kitchen, and Nara opens up her pantry, which is in a very normal state of disarray. Over in the corner of the room is a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes and the lonely tripod. This house of theirs, a rental, is modern and slick, with the bare walls of a model home—the perfect backdrop for content creation.
Lucky looks out into the yard and notes how unmanicured it is. This lease is up at the end of the year, after which the couple are hoping to move closer to a major fashion city—maybe New York, although they need more room to spread out than an apartment would allow. They want to buy a house and put down roots.
“We want a backyard, and I want to start gardening and planting my own stuff,” Nara says.
“Really bother people on the internet,” Lucky points out with a playful smile.
Nara has a glint in her eye as we all pause, imagining the videos of her making pizza from scratch and literally walking out into her garden to pick a tomato she grew.
“It would really push people over the edge,” she says.
Carrie Battan is a frequent GQ contributor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of GQ with the title “Home on the Range with Lucky Blue and Nara Aziza Smith”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Jason Nocito
Styled by Jon Tietz
Hair by Mitchell Cantrell using Andrew Fitzsimons Haircare
Makeup by Yasmin Istanbouli at The Wall Group
Grooming by Al Tidwell at Kim Dawson Agency
Tailoring by Michele Nordahl
Prop styling by Marisa Dukowitz
Produced by Tamco Productions