On July 23, 2022, Martha Stewart shared a breathtaking photo of peach cobbler on Instagram. It was exactly the kind of thing a casual observer would expect Martha Stewart to post: domestic, attractive, aspirational. The recipe, she said, was from her cookbook; the fruit was from her orchard.
It was not Martha’s first post of the day. Earlier, she’d shared a blurry video of a peacock strutting in full plume. It was scored with “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye. “RIP beautiful BlueBoy,” the caption read. “The coyotes came in broad daylight and devoured him and five others including the magnificent White Boy any solutions for getting rid of six large and aggressive coyotes who have expensive tastes when it comes to poultry?? we are no longer allowing the peafowl out of their yard, we are enclosing the top of their large yard with wire fencing etc. and by the way i do not have any idea how the marvin gaye music found it’s way. to this sad post but when Blue Boy was alive it would have been perfectly appropriate.” (For the purposes of this analysis, all original punctuation and spacing has been meticulously preserved.)
Any domestic goddess—Ina, Chrissy, Gwyneth—can post a cobbler. It is the post about the extinguished peafowl, its blurry footage and stream-of-consciousness caption, that demonstrates the singularity of @MarthaStewart48.
For the last decade, @MarthaStewart48 has posted about Martha’s garden, her domestic staff, her menagerie of show dogs and assorted farm animals, and her grandchildren in exquisite detail, with a kind of guilelessness that makes her seem like a person who does not know how the internet works. (“Jude studies weekly with Oran, music teacher extraordinaire He is opening a new studio call 646 926 1840 for information Oran teaches bespoke classes for children and adults Timbalooloo@gmail.com write or call for info.”)
It is not what she posts that is spectacular (domestic excess, hydrangeas), but how she posts, which is to say: like a person unencumbered by the burden of her 1.9 million followers. She posts from restaurants and galas and vacations; she posts candid photos of her food, unstyled, apparently unedited, and oftentimes unappetizing. Here is Martha Stewart, unself-conscious and unsentimental, a grandmother who needs to clean her phone camera, a farmgirl who has come to terms with the omnipresence of death.
This is an illusion, obviously: Martha Stewart, doyenne of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, knows more about the internet than almost anybody. She knows, for example, that tossing off blurry, typo-ridden missives about the minutiae of her country-mogul life (and thirst traps) is exactly what the people want. The immediate intimacy of off-brand imperfection is the whole joke—she’s an 82-year-old domestic goddess with a finsta! Hahahaha.
It is a stark contrast to the @MarthaStewart brand account, which is shiny, consistently well lit, and warmly detached.