In 2024, tradwife fashion was everywhere from sourdough starter tutorials to designer campaigns. Here’s what our fixation on stylized domesticity says about us.
I am captivated by the woman on my screen. She comes to me in her kitchen, bearing a faint smile, speaking in a soothing tone and ready to whip up something tasty from scratch. She wears a conservatively tailored dress, showing off her lithe figure through a modest silhouette. She is conventionally beautiful, entertaining to watch, and — whether I admit it to myself or not — aspirational. She is a tradwife, and she has become a shaping force in today’s cultural landscape.
By now, you’ve seen the videos. The social-media-shorthand term for traditional wife, “tradwife” content has taken over the zeitgeist. On TikTok, there are over 125 million posts under the topic, showing polished stay-at-home wives cooking and caring for their families. Think pieces have been penned about their politics, amateur home cooks have attempted to recreate their recipes and magazine editors have imitated their outfits. At this point, the tradwife movement exists in a distinct aesthetic realm, governed by a handful of recognizable creators.
Hannah Neeleman (a.k.a. Ballerina Farm) is perhaps the most infamous; she dons floral dresses as she milks her sheep and tends to her eight children. Estee Williams is a more radical figure; she wears tea-length silhouettes and doles out antiquated housewifery advice. Nara Smith doesn’t claim the title but has become the de facto face of it; she sports Chanel to make Nutella from scratch — among other extravagant culinary pursuits. Smith has whipped up rice pudding in Schiaparelli. She’s DIY’d Capri Sun in a micro-pleated J’amemme dress. She’s crafted Fruit Loops by hand in a sheer Tularosa mini. In carving out this lavish kitchen-focused content niche, she has come to embody the category of wealthy at-home internet stars. “[Tradwives are] people performing domestic labour and making it look pretty,” says Caro Claire Burke, a cultural critic and journalist who frequently reports on the topic. Her upcoming fiction book, Yesteryear — following a tradwife influencer who time-travels — is set to be adapted into a film starring Anne Hathaway.
As its name suggests, the tradwife aesthetic leans into the traditionally feminine, comprising vintage-inspired silhouettes, soft fabrics and pastel hues. Prairie-style dresses, milkmaid tops and delicate details like lace piping and floral motifs are a staple in the space — and these pristine looks are not cheap to attain. “All of these women who have millions of followers are spending tens of thousands of dollars a year, if not more, on their outfits,” Burke says. (It’s a common influencer strategy: splurge on designer clothes and drive up the aspirational factor to followers.) Neeleman, for one, never tags the brands she’s wearing, leaving many to sleuth on Reddit threads or TikTok comments about whether she’s opted for Christy Dawn, Dôen or Loeffler Randal that day. Married to the heir of a billion-dollar fortune, her wardrobe is undeniably costly. But in line with the frugal farm life she shows her nearly two million followers, she keeps it discreet. Old-money imagery is a prerequisite for the tradwife aesthetic, and it’s gone from infiltrating feeds to dominating fashion institutions.
On the runways, 1950s and ’60s style codes have been trending for some time. During the Fall 2024 season, Miu Miu paraded shift dresses with pearls, Christian Cowan championed voluminous full skirts and Marc Jacobs offered an exaggerated homage to ’50s bell shapes. Most recently, Who What Wear coined “debutante dressing” as one of the defining looks of the year, praising a return to “refined” self-styling in the process. These days, retro homemaking and high fashion are intersecting more than ever.
The aforementioned Nara Smith is the most obvious example. While her style is not pegged to the 1950s, it taps into the appeal of well-established elegance, says Linda Sumbu, the creator behind popular fashion commentary X account @itgirlenergy. “The clothes she wears, the way she carries herself, the elaborate meals she’s making, it all adds to this old-timey aesthetic,” she explains, noting how easy it is to forget that Nara Smith is 23 years old. “It’s like watching a vintage ad.”
As a result, a serene fantasy oozes from these videos. We don’t see Smith — or other tradwife influencers — scrubbing the toilet, emptying the garbage or cleaning out the fridge. “It’s almost like a Wes Anderson film,” says Burke. “Everything is tweaked to look more appealing.” Regardless of what they’re doing, the hair remains perfect, the smile stays on and the outfit never dirties. “No wonder people are obsessed with it,” Burke notes. But where did this obsession come from?
“The rise of tradwife fashion speaks to a broader cultural response to uncertainty,” says psychologist Carolyn Mair, a fashion business consultant and author of The Psychology of Fashion. While many are pushing for progressive social change, the tradwife offers a countermovement, she explains. “It’s celebrating a simplified version of traditional roles.” Of course, the concept of the conventional homemaker is not entirely historically accurate; many women — especially those with intersecting identities — have always had to work. “Black women have never been involved in the conversation around staying at home and being housewives,” notes creator Madisyn Brown in a video essay on the subject. So it’s not really that “trad”; it’s a form of modern escapism through languid luxury and flowy ensembles. After all, fantasizing about being a housewife in a dreamt-up utopia is arguably more du jour than pining for professional success.
The tradwife aesthetic coincides with what Burke calls a “mass disenchantment” at work. In response to burnout from 2010s-era girlboss-ing (when business casual clothing reigned supreme), an anti-hustle attitude was born, propelled by “I don’t dream of labour” memes and “soft life” videos filled with faded pink palettes. Most recently, Matilda Djerf — the 2020s’ answer to the girlboss — was exposed as a nightmarish employer, further swaying public opinion away from the image of the blazer-wearing It girl founder and exacerbating disillusionment with cut-throat corporate culture. “There are a lot of women who can’t afford to leave their jobs; it’s a luxury to be able to do that,” she says. “I wouldn’t say it’s a luxury to be a homemaker, because that is work as well. But I think that’s why so much of what our culture finds relaxing has changed — like seeing a woman in a prairie milking a cow.”
And it’s not just any woman. “Those at the forefront of the tradwife aesthetic are thin, pale and blonde,” says Sumbu. “Women of colour and bigger women are often kept out.” Like many aspects of the tradwife trend, this echoes in other areas of pop culture, with Sumbu pointing to the industry-wide decline of plus-size models and the blatant rise of fatphobia (a concept rooted in racism) on the internet. “It’s been jarring to see how many people are going back to that notion that everybody should be skinny,” she says.
Thinness has long symbolized restraint, discipline and suppression of desire. Within the context of the tradwife trend, it serves as a visual indicator of dutiful obedience. It’s also worth noting that this gender-role-enforced image coincides with another viral trend: the oft-infantilizing glamourization of the “girl” through coquette accents, ballet core and a sudden ubiquity of bows. These two online movements overlap, says Mair, by celebrating a certain kind of womanhood. “Both infantilization and the tradwife aesthetic suggest that femininity is safer and more appealing when it is non-threatening or even subservient.”
The irony is that TikTok tradwives are performers; they have built their own fan bases and are not bound to their husbands’ budgets. “Most of the women behind these accounts are working, they’re earning money,” says Burke. “They’re often the primary breadwinners.” They’re also masters at monetizing.
Case in point: when I reach out to the Ballerina Farm team, I never hear back about my request to interview Neeleman for this story. I do, however, receive an offer to review her (recently restocked!) Farmer Protein Powder. I may not be able to live like the tradwife I see on my screen, whose dishes are cleaned instantly, who always looks vaguely content and who wears couture to fetch a midnight snack. But perhaps that’s why, like so many others, I find it intoxicating. It’s okay to enjoy this over-the-top presentation, as long as I remember it’s not real. Ultimately, the tradwife aesthetic, just like each video’s home-cooked dinner, is made entirely from scratch.
