Inside Martha Stewart’s ‘Finsta’ of 1.9 Million Followers

On July 23, 2022, Martha Stewart posted a 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 posted 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 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. “For a meatless main that is worthy of your next vegetarian night, try this Mexican-inspired tofu-tomatillo stew,” it offers. It proposes “7 Ways to Make Your Laundry Smell Fresh.” If @MarthaStewart precisely lives up to Stewartian expectations—buttoned-up perfection—@MarthaStewart48 does both more and less. It is Martha at the pinnacle of Martha-ness, apparently dispatched directly from her mind, wholly unmediated. The posts are disarmingly blunt, wickedly unsentimental, weirdly moving, bizarrely punctuated. (“Carlos figured out a great way to wash the chow chows! using the very spacious @scenicroadmfg wheel barrow from our stable he filled it with warm water. , soaped the dogs and rinsed them well using the stable wash stall where we wash the horses and donkeys. no mess in the basement, no locating a sink large enough for the big boy!! now we just need a drain with a secure stopper in the wheel barrow. hint hint????”)

The general consensus about @MarthaStewart48 is that it is mesmerizing because it is “authentic,” meaning, as Quartz explained, in 2018, that “she posts what she wants, regardless of its marketability,” thus granting us access to what Guest of a Guest insists is her “truly unscripted, indifferent, magical life.” This is all the more delicious because it is, in theory, unexpected: Martha, the brand, is perfect and rehearsed—even her supposedly unlikely friendship with the rapper Snoop Dogg has been exhaustively mined for corporate content, in the form of Martha & Snoop’s Potlock Dinner Party on VH1 and numerous ads—but Martha, the personal Instagram account, is off-handed and occasionally unhinged. This, the account promises, is the real Martha, who is leading what Quartz proclaimed is “a life we can relate to.”

I watched several Instagram stories about Martha’s Arctic cruise, which had recently become controversial. Somewhere between Iceland and Greenland, she’d posted a picture of herself with a cocktail, which had, according to the caption, been chilled with ice from “a small iceberg.” This struck some of her followers as “tone-deaf” and “out of touch.” A small firestorm ensued, ending in her vindication. (For the record, glaciologists say it’s perfectly fine to chill your cocktail using ice from an iceberg the next time you’re on a luxury Arctic cruise.)

But, I realized, none of this felt relatable at all. What makes @MarthaStewart48 feel like the unfiltered thoughts and tossed-off impressions of actual Martha is in fact how casually alien it is. Famous people are always trying to convince you that they are just like everybody else. They also eat Chipotle and get tired and often walk their dogs! They love coffee too!

Martha Stewart, on the other hand, is nothing like you. Martha Stewart is a woman with a staff, an estate in Katonah, New York (Cantitoe Corners), a business empire, an estate in Seal Harbor, Maine (Skylands), and at least five donkeys. Of course she’s not like you, and she has no interest in pretending she is—that would be stupid, obviously, and Martha is not dumb. She does not perform relatability, or even likability; the only thing that she performs is the art of being Martha, a woman who lives an extremely particular kind of life. She does this without affectation: One never has the sense, on @MarthaStewart48, that she is not exactly the level of interested in hydrangeas that she purports to be. According to Martha herself, as relayed by Martha’s representatives, the account is meant to be “impulsive, diary-like, and interesting,” which it is.

There was a time when Martha’s mere existence was controversial. Depending on your own position, she was either an inspirational embodiment of female liberation or an aspirational trap. Here was a ruthlessly ambitious business mogul who’d built an empire holding up domestic standards that most women—and particularly professionally ambitious women like her—would fail to meet, her critics said. Her defenders, chief among them Joan Didion, saw this as a gross misunderstanding. Martha’s “promise” to her readers and her viewers, Didion wrote in 2000, “is that know-how in the house will translate to can-do outside of it.” Hers was the story of a woman who had taken preternatural competence and turned it into hard power.

Twenty-three years and one short prison sentence later, Martha Stewart has transcended it all. She appeals to the old and to the young. Based on comments on her Instagram, her appeal crosses both sides of the aisle. She has promoted, collaborated with, or otherwise endorsed a list of products that includes but is not limited to: CBD gummies; Tito’s vodka; Oreo cookies; Aerosoles and Skechers; Liquid Death water ; Roe caviar; BIC lighters; Kubota tractors; Clé de Peau skincare; and $13 Chardonnay, all of which feel entirely on brand. Martha is expensive. Martha is QVC. Martha is breathable footwear; Martha is marginally medicinal jellied cubes.

In an essay in The Guardian, writer Dan Brooks breaks down the secrets of great posters. “The first criterion is intangible,” he writes. “Great posters are very much themselves, not just communicating ideas but iterating with each tweet a character—one that offers both a candid presentation of their thoughts and a knowing, semi-ironic performance of them.” Brooks was writing about Trump, but—in this one way—he could have been writing about Martha, who seems forever engaged in a competition to become the most herself.

This puts her in a rarified position on the internet: She seems fearless. She is matter-of-fact about the life she lives, whether or not you like it. “As for punctuation and grammar And spelling Please!!! I write on horseback, in the car, in the dark, In a rush Give me a break!!!!!!!!!,” she wrote at one point, captioning a picture of eggs fresh-laid by her hens. She has no time for or interest in making her existence scrutable to commoners, and while she responds occasionally to criticism, she is philosophically unmoved. “The comments,” she offered Zen-ly, through a representative, “are often better left unread.”

Here, for example, is Martha, on January 6, 2021, the day of the attack on the US capitol, captioning a picture of two of her galavanting Friesans: “A crisp and cold but bright and beautiful day for a ride! Rinze and Bond love this weather and want to stay out all day and night! Frisky. And by the way , I am as informed as any of you, but I can still find time in a day, even a day as sad and depressing as this day, to tend to farm and business and still discuss with family and friends the State of the Union!” For the most part, Martha’s commenters responded with their support.

And yet, even Martha, who does not equivocate about her caviar or apologize for her pack of purebred dogs, is stuck with the same internet as the rest of us. Her posts may be impulsive, diary-like, and interesting, but she is also not above girding herself against imagined criticism that does not yet exist—the curse of the terminally online. Very occasionally her tone becomes preemptively defensive: “By NY guidelines I was entirely qualified,” she wrote, in a post about her COVID-19 shot. “We are compliant and we have great pilots who watch over our safety !!!” Another post insists, documenting her flight home from Oklahoma with eight cercis canadensis trees. “We post every day and the info is well researched and very pertinent,” she said, in the post about her chickens. Had anyone said otherwise?

I feel closest to Martha in these moments, when she appears most aware of possibly being uncharitably watched. To voluntarily advertise the minutiae of your life online, and then, in the same breath, defend against the potential backlash—that is the masochistic agony of posting! Her Arctic tourism is foreign; her pastoral life unreachable. But in this one way, at least, @MarthaStewart48 is just like us after all.