No one has had a trajectory like Martha Stewart’s. Over a six-decade career, the 83-year-old has been a Chanel model, a Wall Street suit, an American sweetheart, a lifestyle guru, a media tycoon, a convicted felon and a friend to Snoop Dogg. Now she begins her next chapter: a speaker at Vivid Sydney.
Vivid – a light festival designed to be hated by anyone who enjoys activities like “walking through a city without being assailed by foot traffic” – has embarked on a booking spree of late. When she arrives in Sydney this May, Stewart will be the latest addition to the festival’s “Global Storytellers” program which began in 2022 and seems intent on hiring exclusively gay and gay-adjacent speakers: Troye Sivan, Mike White and Jeanette Winterson (all queer); Jennifer Coolidge (gay icon); Baz Luhrmann (made Moulin Rouge); and Aaron Sorkin (talks fast).
Stewart is set to appear in conversation about “the changing face of food, design and home life” as well as “the evolution of her personal brand”. Evolution is an understatement: she was born in 1941 to a middle-class family in New Jersey and by age 30 she had dabbled in modelling and commercial acting – with a short-lived digression as a stockbroker – before settling on a Connecticut farm. It wasn’t until the late 1970s, though, that Martha Stewart – the trademark – began to emerge.
On anyone else, the lore would sound apocryphal; for Stewart, it was a Wednesday night. She was running a catering company, and her bigwig publisher husband had enlisted her to feed some hungry editors. A Penguin exec was so taken with her cooking that soon enough, she had her own volume: 1982’s Entertaining, part-cookbook, part-hosting manual that includes both a recipe for salmon quiche and a country wedding banquet to serve 175 guests.
Entertaining – and the eight books that followed in the subsequent eight years – made Stewart a household name. Vivid terms her “the original influencer”, which seems too crass for someone making wedding banquets for 175; “doyenne of domesticity”, as her much-watched Netflix documentary last year called her, seems more fitting. With a magazine that, at its peak, sold 2m copies an issue and a weekly TV show under her belt, she became America’s leading lifestyle maven: the expert in etiquette, grand dame of gardening, connoisseur of country cuisine and purveyor of perfection.
A media conglomerate followed in 1997, when she collected all her business efforts under the definitely-not-nefariously-named Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia – an enterprise which made her the first female self-made billionaire. In the boorish bloodsport of the stock market, Stewart proved that women could do it all: cook, garden, host, profit – and also obstruct justice! In 2004, she was sentenced to five months in jail for her role in an insider trading scandal. Suddenly, America’s princess was America’s prison bunny.
But like everything else in her life, Stewart remade jail in her own image, turning her West Virginia prison camp into a personal ceramics workshop. To celebrate Christmas in detention, she made a 14-piece clay nativity set – which she later began selling on her website, hawking its “street cred”. She left jail in March 2005 in – what else – a private jet.
Stewart was now a prison camp legend and a camp camp legend. Against all odds, she staged a comeback with a salvo of new projects: more TV shows, more merch, more cameos, more spin-offs, more, more, more. The image laundering was breathtaking, boosted in no small part by her unlikely partnership with Snoop Dogg – who was first a guest on her cooking series and then a bona fide friend. The pair have competed on gameshows, advertised Bic lighters, and hosted a joint reality show inviting celebrities to dinner parties.
In recent years, she has launched a line of CBD gummies and a podcast – two ventures that should be outlawed for everyone but Stewart. When she modelled for Sports Illustrated in 2023, she became the magazine’s oldest cover star at 81. It feels right that she’s speaking about “personal brands” at Vivid – after all, she practically invented the rebrand.
In Conversation with Martha Stewart will take place at the International Convention Centre (ICC) Sydney on 28 May as part of Vivid Sydney
