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Martha Stewart: The Queen of All Influencers
Stewart's sassy wit and smart style attracts fans across generations
9-minute read
“Homemaking can be very beautiful, it can be sexy, it can be intriguing, it can be intellectual. It isn’t just cleaning your house and begrudgingly cooking the meals for your family,” Stewart told AARP in a recent interview.
Victoria Wills
In the past decade, Martha Stewart has won over a new generation with a saucier, sassier persona. The 85-year-old has even earned a moniker any younger influencer would envy: “Queen of Instagram.”
But before there was Instagram, TikTok or even Facebook, there was Martha. Since the 1982 debut of her first cookbook, Entertaining, Stewart has been dubbed a “domestic goddess,” the “high priestess of homemaking” and a “lifestyle guru,” teaching generations what to cook, how to entertain, what to plant, how to decorate and, increasingly, what to buy.
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She learned the nuts and bolts of homemaking as a child growing up in New Jersey from her own first influencers: her schoolteacher mom and teacher-salesman dad.
“We were all doers in our family,” Stewart tells AARP. “Work was both work and pleasure — and learning.”
Over a crackling speakerphone from her farmhouse in Bedford, New York, Stewart is chatty and warm but briskly efficient — often cutting off a question before it’s finished, anticipating (rightly) where it’s headed and barreling into the answer.
That no-nonsense efficiency was honed early.
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As a teen model, she helped support the family of eight and pay her tuition at Columbia’s Barnard College — and also picked up invaluable lessons for the one-woman brand she would soon become: “I learned not only how to pose in front of a camera,” she recalls, “but also about the big business of advertising.”
At 19, her world expanded again. Newly married to law student Andrew Stewart, she spent five months crisscrossing Europe with him in their Volkswagen Bug — a 3,000-mile honeymoon that filled her senses with new flavors, architecture and ideas of beauty. “The food in Yugoslavia was so good,” she gushes at the memory. “The olive oil, the tomatoes … We ate right from the farmers markets. I made salads in the car. We ate the local cheeses and drank the local wines.” It was all future content for the tastemaker she was quickly becoming.
But first, as the only woman at an all-male brokerage firm, she wowed them on Wall Street, where, she says, “I learned how to be a salesman, and I learned how to make money.” Seven years later, she traded stocks for stockpots, moving to Westport, Connecticut, where she restored a rambling 1805 farmhouse and launched a wildly successful catering business from her kitchen. With the 1990 arrival of Martha Stewart Living magazine, followed by her syndicated television show in 1993, her influence — and audience — soared. (Her love life, though, took a turn: In 1990 she divorced her husband, with whom she had a daughter, Alexis, now 60. Stewart has since been romantically linked with several high-profile men but never remarried.) In 1997, Kmart shoppers could buy sheets, towels and house paint bearing her name. And by 2001, her multimedia empire was reaching 88 million people per month — all before social media even existed.
Martha Stewart By the Numbers
Instagram: 3m followers (Plus 5.9m following on Martha Stewart Living)
TikTok: 2m followers
Her brand took a hit after her 2004 conviction and five-month prison stint relating to a stock trade — a catastrophe that would have destroyed another personal brand. Not Martha’s. She bounced back with crafts, talk-and-cooking shows, meal kits, a New York City café and even Martha-branded houses.
Most recently, Stewart was named “Cast Iron Ambassador” by Kohler and launched Elm Biosciences’ Elemental Lip Serum (check out her pouty portrait on Instagram) in September.
But two of her most devoted young fans know the Queen of Instagram simply as their grandmother: Jude, 15, and Truman, 14, who have traveled all seven continents with her, sampling new tastes and cultures — as she did at 19.
“That’s our big thing together — world travel,” says Stewart, who published her 102nd book in May and is working on a memoir. “They learn tremendous amounts of facts and geography on every trip.”
In turn, she proudly points out, “they teach me what’s going on right now with the youth of America.”
Because being the OG means you never stop learning.
What is it that you’ve been trying to tell the world?
My message was: Homemaking can be very beautiful, it can be sexy, it can be intriguing, it can be intellectual. It isn’t just cleaning your house and begrudgingly cooking the meals for your family. It can be exciting.
I wanted to elevate a task, which is housekeeping, to the art of homemaking. And that’s what I did. We elevated one very important aspect of every single day of living to an art form. It hasn’t really changed.
Today you have 3 million followers on your personal Instagram page. What draws the biggest reaction?
Anything with Snoop Dogg. I recently posted a picture with David Beckham and got a million-something views. Instagram is so easy to upload photos, so easy to write captions, so easy to see results, to see the reader interaction. People know where in the world I am, what I’m doing, what I’m wearing, what I’m promoting. I’ve done TikToking and, of course, YouTubing.
"Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner” was a cooking and variety show hosted by the two famous besties that ran from 2016 to 2020. The pair have collaborated on a number of projects together.
Douglas Friedman/Trunk Archive
What makes a successful influencer?
I don’t really know, because so many people are influencing so many millions of people in very odd ways today. I just spent three days with [28-year-old media personality] MrBeast. Who the heck is MrBeast? Why is he getting billions of hits on his YouTube channels? He struck a chord. He found a void that wasn’t being filled, and he filled it. You have to study each influencer and see, are they really influencing, or are they just wasting people’s time? He does not seem to be wasting people’s time. He seems to be entertaining and intriguing.
You’ve always been the face of your brand. Why has that worked so well?
People want to know you. They want to know that you’re part of their daily life, important to them in some specific way.
You’ve been called the OG — original gangster — of influencers. Your signature catchphrase from the ’90s, “It’s a good thing,” was pre-internet-meme gold.
That was something I said on my very first TV show in 1993. I painted a handle of a piece of garden equipment orange, and I said, “Now this will never get lost in the garden. It’s a good thing.”
You took it “viral” — it became a theme in your magazine. Another good thing!
When I first started, we didn’t have Instagram, we didn’t have Twitter, we didn’t have Facebook. All that stuff came later. So the magazine, Martha Stewart Living, was very important to people. They read every single word and kept every issue. People still come up to me all the time and say, “I have every issue of your magazine, so I still refer to it all the time.” It’s exactly what you want to have happened.
Martha Stewart has one daughter, Alexis Stewart (shown here in 1990) and two grandchildren, Jude and Truman, who have traveled all seven continents with their grandmother.
Jean Pigozzi/Trunk Archive
You have great chemistry with Snoop Dogg. How did your pairing come about?
He was on my TV show several times. He made brownies with me, but he made his green brownies and I made my brown brownies. And people loved it. They loved the rap music, they loved that I liked rap music. I was introducing them to something new and different. I think I was the first TV personality to really focus a little bit on rap. I had not only Snoop Dogg, but I had Busta Rhymes and I had Puff Daddy — pre P. Diddy. And then Snoop and I did that 2015 Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber together, and we sat next to each other and became the adorable couple of the roast.
One of your most viral Instagram posts was a sultry selfie by the pool circa 2020. Had you heard of the term “thirst trap” beforehand?
Oh no, absolutely not. I had no idea. I thought it was just a really great picture of me.
As was your very viral 2023 Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover. You recently turned 85; what message do you have for women of a certain age?That you can be very attractive at any age; you don’t have to become a frump. You should maintain a femininity, you should maintain a beauty, you should maintain good health, you should maintain strength. You should do all of it.
Your sexy ad for MAC lipstick, with you biting into a strawberry and licking honey, was very Kim Basinger à la 9½ Weeks.
I love that movie. I might have been thinking of that.
It was your idea?
Of course! If it’s on my Instagram, it’s pretty much my idea. I have people helping me [with social media], but everything you see on my personal Instagram is pretty much my posts — that’s @marthastewart48.
Martha Stewart at the New York Stock Exchange in 1999. Before Stewart turned homemaking into a business, she was the only woman at an all-male brokerage firm. “I learned how to be a salesman, and I learned how to make money.”
Corbis/Getty Images
Who do you follow on social media?
I scroll through things that interest me. I like to see what’s doing in cooking, what’s doing in gardening, in pruning bushes and trees. I like extraordinary things and performances. I like to see geniuses at work. It’s very random, what I follow.
Among your zillion businesses, we noticed you’re getting into online matchmaking.
Oh, I posted last week about my car repairman and my chow chow. I called it “Two hunks looking for mates” — Emperor Han, my 8-year-old chow, and Mike Keane, who lives nearby and comes to visit the horses and dogs. They’re sitting on the floor, two very handsome guys. Girls from all over commented. It got 560 comments — that’s a lot of comments. It got almost a million views.
You love this proverb: If you want to be happy for a week, get married. If you want to be happy for 10 years, get a dog. If you want to be happy for life, make a garden.
I totally believe that.
So … how are your gardens doing?
My gardens are so beautiful. I left my house a quarter to 8 this morning to do an errand, and I saw my orange lily bed all in bloom, so I took a video. I don’t waste an opportunity.
Martha Stewart boards a private jet with her daughter Alexis in 2005.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
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