No. 1: Martha Stewart — The Original Influencer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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