Martha Stewart on becoming Sports Illustrated’s oldest swimsuit cover model
‘I was motivated by showing people that a woman my age can still look good, feel good, be good,’ Stewart said of the cover of the magazine’s annual swimsuit issue.
Martha Stewart’s sex-symbol era began anew in her late 70s, when she posted a photo of herself on Instagram emerging from her East Hampton pool and called it a “thirst trap.”
Since then, the CEO and mogul has reinvented herself from bumpkin to bombshell, more likely to attend gala events in luxe Hermès outfits and full makeup than to plant bulbs in khakis as she did in the 1980s.
Today, she’s come full circle in her late-in-life glow-up by becoming the oldest woman to appear on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue.
“Is it a sex symbol, or is it a symbol of healthy living?” asked Ms. Stewart, 81. “We can hardly say sex symbol nowadays, right? Overt sex is kind of frowned upon.” Nonetheless, the businesswoman appears in glamorous, revealing swimwear that leaves little to the imagination. The photos were shot in the Dominican Republic by Ruvén Afanador, whom she trusted immediately because he first took Ms. Stewart’s portrait in 1993. She appears in several swim looks, including lounging on a couch in a white one-piece maillot and being doused by water in a silver metallic zip-up.
The white deep-cleavage “Aruba” one-piece she wears on the cover, by Monday Swimwear, is already sold out in some sizes. Call it the Martha effect.
The reaction to Martha dwarfed the announcement of this year’s other covers, featuring Megan Fox, Brooks Nader and trans pop star Kim Petras. Most responses were positive.
Writer and podcast host Evan Ross Katz wrote on Instagram that the cover was “the serve of the century” on a post that has 37,974 likes and counting, and more queen emojis than I could count.
When I mentioned the profusion of queen emojis to Ms. Stewart, she laughed and joked, “The queen is dead so long live the new queen!”
“I’ve been hearing from people I haven’t heard from in years,” Ms. Stewart told me, saying she’d been too busy in meetings to take all the calls.
“Can you imagine being congratulated for a cover? I was never congratulated for all my covers on Martha Stewart Living.” Ms. Stewart said she looked at the cover shoot as a challenge, and relished the opportunity to be the oldest woman to front the publication. In a video for Sports Illustrated, Ms. Stewart said, “Usually I’m motivated by pay, but this time I was motivated by showing people that a woman my age can still look good and feel good.”
For the work, she was given the standard editorial rate that Sports Illustrated pays all models -- little enough for Ms. Stewart to say she was “not paid.”
The businesswoman, who modeled decades ago to put herself through Barnard, took the physicality of the shoot seriously. She forwent bread and pasta for a couple months. She does reformer Pilates every other day at 6:30 a.m. with a private instructor in her hometown of Bedford, N.Y. Ms. Stewart said she was told that she did more reps than anyone else, going for 100 when others would be satisfied with 10. She drank her standard green juice every morning, which she told me had not changed since we last spoke in 2020, except for the subtraction of pineapple which has been deemed too sugary.
“Everyone is over the moon about Martha,” said Sports Illustrated Swimsuit editor in chief MJ Day, who has helmed the magazine for 12 years. For Ms. Day, the Martha cover is a continuation of a project the magazine has been undertaking for several years now to highlight a wider range of ages. In 2022, one cover featured then-74-year-old Maye Musk, and in previous years the magazine has featured then-60-something Christie Brinkley and then-50-something Paulina Porizkova.
Ms. Day rejects the idea that the magazine is solely for men, arguing that women have always looked to it for swimwear trends. And recently, that female readership has grown. She said, “We’ve always had this unsung demographic of women that we weren’t really speaking directly to. And as we’ve done that over the past decade-plus, that reach and that conversation and that connectivity, those touchpoints have grown exponentially.” Ms. Day, who is 48 and told me she wears a size 12, said that inclusivity was important to the brand. Part of her job, she said, is “continuing to have those important conversations for women that we can see ourselves outside of the very stringent parameters that we’re used to seeing ourselves represented in.”
Kim France, the former editor in chief of Lucky magazine and the podcaster and blogger behind “Girls of a Certain Age,” was not overwhelmed by the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit statement. “It looks like a big risk, but I think it was a small risk,” she said, calling the annual issue a relic. Multiple covers may help the magazine project an inclusive image, she said, but it waters down the message of featuring an octogenarian: “I feel like if they put her on the only cover they had on newsstands, then I’d be impressed.” As for Ms. Stewart, she looks forward to reading the comments on all the posts, and then getting on with her life. In the next 10 years, she said, “I care more about watching the evolution of my grandchildren than I care about watching my evolution.”
The Wall Street Journal
