The Lie of Trad Wives
And how fashion helped create the phenomenon currently dominating social media.
There is no “Loose Threads” today, but if you haven’t yet, check out the first excerpt from my new book, Gwyneth: The Biography, in People magazine.
“Influencers sell just about freaking anything,” said Jo Piazza. “Henfluencers are a big subset of the trad wives. They're making a lot of money on chicken coops and chicken feed.”
A journalist and novelist, Piazza’s new thriller Everyone Is Lying to You is set in the world of trad (short for “traditional”) wives, exploring how they attract enormous online audiences by showcasing an unrealistic fantasy of extreme homemaking and old-fashioned gender roles. Take Nara Smith, a former model who now makes Cinnamon Toast Crunch and fruit roll-ups from scratch for her kids. Often, she wears evening wear while she cooks. “I made the Cinnamon Toast Crunch-from-scratch recipe the other day,” said Piazza. “It took me four hours, and it was disgusting.”
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Those four hours did not include the time Piazza spent making content about the endeavor to post to social media. Because, make no mistake: even though trad wives display a fantasy of life that doesn’t involve working a typical job, they’re still byproducts of hustle culture — entrepreneurs with slickly operated businesses raking in millions of dollars. It’s capitalism dressed up in a nap dress.
As part of her research for the book, Piazza interviewed about a dozen trad wife influencers. She and I talked about her foray into this world, how celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Meghan Markle are capitalizing on it — and how fashion helped start it all.
Why did you want to write about trad wives?
I started seeing the trad wife trend two years ago. I thought it was going to be a blip, but I think it was the fashion that helped it grow originally. We came from this generation that was told to “lean in” and to be a girl boss. Trad wives came around at a time when I think a lot of people were burnt out on juggling a corporate job, trying to be everything everywhere all at once. All of a sudden, these beautiful Instagram accounts come up with these “nap” dresses that look like we could just fall asleep in them. I think fashion was the gateway [to trad wives] for a lot of people. Like, I do want to take off my structured pants.
I get it. As someone who works, who feels professional ambition, who has two young kids, and who is really tired all the time, I find that I increasingly enjoy doing things with my hands, like gardening. I like that I can’t scroll my phone or do anything else while I’m futzing with my plants. Plus, I can do it with my kids.
Same. I don't want to look at a screen. I think that many people have adopted these very tactile hobbies, which we do often see in the trad wife accounts. I'm looking out my window right now at the tomatoes that I have badly grown on the roof.
Which trad wives inspired the characters in the book?
The influencers in the book are a combination of all of them. So you've got the very fierce Nara Smith-inspired one. You have the Ballerina Farm one who's leaning much more into the prairie chic homestead aesthetic. And then you have everything in between.
I know so many women who follow these accounts. I have fallen deep down the rabbit hole of these accounts. Because I'm a reporter, I report everything, including my fiction. What I found out is that it is all a fantasy and a lie.
They're doing all of these photo shoots and video shoots in a single day. They're switching outfits and changing their kids clothes 19 times. Many rent houses to shoot in. None of it is their real life. But I don't think we're thinking about it as media that is created for capitalist consumption.
That’s the ironic thing — that these women actually are “leaning in.” To earning money, anyway.
They're a hundred percent leaning in, and they're hustling because making content is a lot of work. The ethos is, “You too could just be running around in a field with your 12 children wearing the soft, unstructured dress and no bra and baking sourdough and growing your heirloom tomatoes and not working” — when putting that out on the internet is so much work.
Many of these women are now the breadwinners in their families. Their husbands often run their media companies behind the scenes, but they're creating this whole fantasy that they’re selling you — they're selling you their ridiculously expensive high-protein flour, their egg aprons [aprons for collecting eggs, which you can apparently buy on Revolve] — they're selling you their fantasy.
My impression of creators, having written about the content industry a bunch over the years, is that it’s like trying to be a famous actor — you have a tiny percentage who are super successful, who rake in loads of money, others who are less successful but doing well, and a whole bunch who are striving and earning average salaries at best. Did you find that with the trad wife creators?
So many people are trying to do it. Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith are raking in millions, but you do have a middle tier who are doing very well, who are getting brand deals, hustling their butts off to do affiliate links and content, content, content. Many sell supplements, beef tallow [which people are using as skincare, which is not advised by doctors], face creams. Many sell online courses.
How does this world overlap with MAHA? I thought about MAHA a lot with Gwyneth Paltrow and the early wellness industry as I was researching and writing my book about her.
The overlap is strong. Gwyneth, a girl boss [archetype], is now doing these topless “boyfriend breakfast'“ videos in Tuscany, which the internet cannot seem to get enough of. There's this massive overlap with the ideas of going back to the land, pulling yourself up from the bootstraps, clean living, clean beauty — “cook everything for your kids from scratch, if you're feeding your kids grocery store food you're probably poisoning them.”
“Clean” beauty was Goop’s whole thing in the 2010s. It seemed like a lot of the “clean” products in general stemmed from a fear of parabens, a common and effective preservative in beauty products. And that fear seemed to stem from a flawed study. That's the whole thing with MAHA — promoting ideas based on flawed or fraudulent or misinterpreted studies, and the idea that anything that comes from a corporation is terrible. But in reality, the wellness industry is a huge moneymaker! Big Wellness is five times the size of Big Pharma.
Exactly. The entire trad wife ecosystem is performing capitalism. They're saying that there is a problem, which is that we should be feeding our kids from scratch, we're exhausted, we want to check out of the corporate world. They're solving it by giving us these recipes, by saying that you should lean out, that you should rest, that if you buy all of these things that they're selling — like their heirloom tomato trellises and their hen houses — then you can be as happy as they appear in these videos.
Why do you think fashion brands are embracing this genre?
Because they're the new celebrities. More people are paying attention to these accounts than watching the latest Netflix show. These influencers have more power [to drive purchases] than a lot of traditional celebrities. We're just going to see brands giving them more and more money.
Everyone is really clamoring for fantasy. There's a reason that romantasy does really well in books right now. The trad wives offer a fantasy — what looks like a really comfortable, easy life. They're not showing the babysitters. They're not showing the tutors or the staffs that clean their houses or shoot their videos.
Where are the men in all of this?
A lot work behind the scenes, we just don't see them that often. We see Nara’s husband [Lucky Blue Smith] a little bit. We rarely see Ballerina Farm's husband. The men are kind of ciphers, off in the distance. I think that that helps fulfill the fantasy.
Oh like, you don’t have to deal with your husband?
Right. You're clearly being supported by this lovely rich man, but you don't ever see his bullshit.
That's another commonality with these accounts — they’re another version of wealth porn.
They never talk about the fact that generational wealth helps run a hobby farm. Farming is expensive. It is filthy. But they're not showing any of that. Ballerina Farm never talks about how she has generational wealth from being a JetBlue heiress.
Meghan Markle’s Netflix show was very trad wife-y too.
It made me kind of want to get bees.
It definitely made me want bees. Have you had someone's honey from their beehive? It's like the best honey you've ever tasted.
It's the best honey ever. She and others who are unapologetic about being businesswomen and building a brand are capitalizing on this trad wife aesthetic because it's doing really well right now.
How does all of this fit into the moment politically? Obviously, this is a bad time for women. (Shout out to Jessica Valenti, who chronicles it all in her newsletter Abortion Every Day.) Women are losing rights. Women are becoming less healthy. Women are dying unnecessarily because of miscarriages.
Trad wife content can be a pipeline, especially for younger women, to the right wing. Not every trad wife is a right wing influencer, but Turning Point USA [a nonprofit that aims to indoctrinate young people into conservative politics] in particular has been grooming a lot of younger trad influencers who are doing very, very well. The conservative women’s magazine Evie created the raw milkmaid dress. Evie is like, let me tell you these makeup tricks and let me show you these beautiful summer outfits and what you should put in your beach bag — and also, get off birth control and have nine babies and just find yourself a husband. A lot of trad wife accounts are being boosted by conservative groups in order to lure women in. And it is a cesspool of misinformation.
Is there a counter-movement to all this?
No. I think it's because women are massively burnt out and exhausted. We have been trying to do it all without structural support. But what isn't sexy on social media is saying, “I can get my work done if I have affordable childcare.” Or, “Being on birth control meant that I didn't have to have a baby with that terrible dude I was dating when I was 29. That was awesome.” Policies that actually make women's lives better don't look sexy on social media — or we haven't figured out a way to do it yet.
What have you learned from trad wives?
To not be afraid of branding and selling my work because they put it out there. I think it takes a lot of courage.
Where does trad wife content go from here?
I think AI is going to make it even more absurd, to be honest. AI is going to be able to create videos that are just pure fantasy without humans in them. So while you're seeing these content creators, they are renting houses, they're changing their outfits 19 times, they're hiring the videographers — AI's going to make this so much faster and make the fantasy even more insane. It's going just dream up a farm. You don't even have to go rent it. You can just pay AI to create it.
Get Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza. You can also find her on Instagram and Substack.
I was just thinking this afternoon that we need to figure out a way and a person/people who make progressive politics look sexy and fun. The far right and their fans take great pleasure and have fun telling the rest of us to cry harder. We need to turn the tables on that.
This was super interesting, Amy, thank you.
As a Canadian, I feel like this is mostly a US thing. It lines up with the social conservatism movement that has been in full force over the last few years. We don't see trad wives here (for the most part - don't come at me if you know someone). The pressure to make everything for your family isn't that new. Martha Stewart was the OG, frankly. I remember a spoof of her magazine, Martha Stewart Living, that was called "Is Martha Stewart Living" and featured a parody article about how to make your own dirt from carbon molecules.