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This Thursday’s episode of The Run-Through covers a lot of exciting ground. First, Vogue’s Liam Hess dials in from Europe to share his insights from London Fashion Week, and chat with Chloe about Demna’s much-anticipated debut at Gucci.
Then, Martha Stewart is on the pod—before a live audience at One World Trade Center—to talk not only about her new skin-care line, Elm Biosciences, but also a wide range of other things: why she hates Bluetooth earbuds; her dream night out in New York; spending her birthday in Maine with Octavia Spencer; her workout routine; what’s in her daily green juice; what she wore during her trial—and so much more. Trust that you won’t want to miss it.
Hear Chloe’s full interview with Martha Stewart above—and read an edited and condensed version of it here:
Chloe Malle: Martha, we are so excited to have you at the World Trade Center.
Martha Stewart: Thank you.
CM: I will tell you, this is the room where we have the company meeting, and there’s not usually this big a crowd, so this is a big excitement for us. Do you listen to podcasts?
MS: I have a podcast.
CM: But do you listen to other podcasts?
MS: I really don’t listen to too many podcasts. I’m sorry about that, ’cause I spend a lot of time in the car. And I don’t use AirPods.
CM: Because of 5G?
MS: That’s how I found my husband was being unfaithful—when he was lying in the garden with [Bluetooth earbuds], and he thought he was covered with leaves, and he had those things in his ears. I’ve hated them ever since.
CM: That’s a good reason. When we were preparing for this interview, I said, “I feel very close to Martha,” because even though we don’t know each other very well, my mother, Candice Bergen, is often confused for you.
MS: I’ve known you since you were born—you don’t even know that. And your mother married an old boyfriend of mine.
CM: I didn’t know that. He was a boyfriend of yours?
MS: Yeah, I went out with him a couple times. He was a very nice man.
CM: You were out and about at New York Fashion Week last week. Tell me about that.
MS: It was busy. Oh my gosh, I had such a good time. I didn’t get to a lot of shows, but I did get to Libertine, which was in the Elizabeth Street Garden. Johnson [Hartig] has done a very good job of helping keep that garden alive. So I support him very much, and I love his clothes. I went to Alexander Wang…
CM: I know, you played mahjong with Cardi B.
MS: Oh my gosh. Cardi B didn’t know anything about mahjong, but she is so fun. And she looked gorgeous. She brought her little seven-year-old girl.
CM: Did you teach Cardi how to play mahjong?
MS: Well, we talked about it, but you can’t do it that fast.
CM: Other Fashion Week parties you went to?
MS: Let me see. I went to J.Crew.
CM: That looked fun. You were in the room full of cashmere, right?
MS: It was so fun. And it turns out, there was a room made [to look] sort of like a bedroom/library, and the blanket on the bed was knitted in dark blue and dark red cashmere—very, very thick cashmere. And my 10-year-old nephew, Silas, had knitted that. I think he got paid $1,200. His mother had worked on it also, and another crafter up in eastern Connecticut. How weird is that connection?
CM: Oh, you didn’t know Silas had done it?
MS: No, I didn’t know that. They’re busy doing all kinds of crafty things. He did a lot of the combing of the cashmere. It was supposed to look like some sort of Rothko blanket.
CM: What’s your dream night out in New York these days?
MS: My dream night out is with somebody interesting. Tomorrow night is very interesting. There are a lot of things going on. It’s Climate Week; you all know that the UN is in session; the traffic is hideous. I am invited by Mayor Bloomberg to go to the dinner at the new Frick with the secretary-general of the UN. So that’ll be interesting. That’s a dream kind of dinner to go to.
CM: What’s the best restaurant in New York at this moment, or where do you love to eat?
MS: Well, [this weekend] I’m going to supposedly the number one restaurant in America. You know what that is?
CM: Tatiana?
MS: No, Atomix. It’s my daughter’s birthday and seven of us are going for dinner.
CM: Have you eaten there before?
MS: No, but I did have them on my show for their restaurant in Rockefeller Center, Naro. And that’s a delicious restaurant. But we’re anxious to see, and my 13- and 14-year-old grandchildren are real, real restaurant critics. They know food better than anybody else. They can tell you every ingredient in a dish.
CM: Your 84th birthday was last month—I’m sorry, it’s on Wikipedia.
MS: They always have to say that. I mean, it’s so stupid.
CM: Because we’re in such awe! And you’re launching skin care—you’re your best ad! But I wondered how you celebrated.
MS: We were in Maine. I have a house up in Maine, in Acadia National Park, and it’s one of our favorite places. We had a few friends, and Octavia Spencer came. I hadn’t met her before. She was so fun, and so nice to everybody.
CM: Leonardo DiCaprio recently said that he emotionally feels 32 years old. I wonder how old you emotionally feel?
MS: Depends on the day, but I don’t think about age. I think one secret of growing old gracefully is not to think about how old you are. If I started to think about how old I was—come on, it would be horrifying. So I don’t think about that. But one thing I do do—and it’s good for anybody older—if you’re over 60, start making younger friends. Of all my friends who are closer in age to me, I am the only one that has really done that successfully. You get a different point of view.
CM: I feel like I’m constantly hearing about a different endeavor that you have.
MS: Well, I’m entrepreneurial by nature. I like starting and doing new things, and I like carrying things through. To start a skin-care line, for example—it’s called Elm Biosciences—this has taken a long time. My partner, Dhaval, is a dermatologist. He is a very astute researcher, and we started to talk about skin care about five years ago. He’s advised other companies—SkinCeuticals was one that he advised; he also advised Rhode, which has just sold itself for a billion dollars after, like, two and a half years. But he understands ingredients—and unusual ingredients. He pays attention to new trends and new happenings in the dermatological world. So he was the right person for me to get involved with. I love chemistry and I love ingredients. I’m a baker, and I like to know how things work.
CM: Do you read comments?
MS: Yes, I like to read comments.
CM: Do you ever reply?
MS: I caught my gardener in a very bad comment last week.
CM: Say more.
MS: Ryan McCallister, who’s, like, this heartthrob for every other gardener in the world—he’s this handsome, handsome Californian who works in my garden. He did a slightly improper description of my eggplants on his Instagram, and some lady wrote to him, and she said, “Oh, this is kind of wild. What would Martha Stewart think?” And he wrote back, “I have a life of my own, so I don’t care.” And so then I wrote back how much I cared, and that post came down within three seconds. We haven’t had our talk yet—that’s five days ago. And he’s been so sweet ever since. But he knows I know.
CM: Martha, I feel like all of us, when we hear about Elm Biosciences, we think about—or I at least think about—that iconic, now-viral photo of you coming out of your pool. What’s the routine for keeping skin looking good?
MS: It’s diet, it’s exercise, it’s all of those things.
CM: What’s your exercise of choice?
MS: I do Pilates three days a week, although I am getting bored with it. At 6:30 in the morning, I’m at the Pilates studio. Two other days I go to Shawn’s Fitness—it’s a men’s gym in Katonah. Thirty minutes with Shawn and you really work out. Then he has a masseur there who works through your clothes on the massage table for 30 minutes. So that’s an hour well spent, and that’s also at 6:30 in the morning. And then I go home and do the farm chores real fast. And I drink my green juice. That’s very important.
CM: What’s in your green juice?
MS: I grow everything that’s in my green juice: cucumbers; parsley; lots of really, really good spinach; ginger root; half of an orange with the peel; lots of celery and celery leaves—I grow very bushy celery—and cucumbers.
CM: At vogue.com, our audience is obsessed with protein. What’s your protein hack?
MS: Um, I don’t eat a lot of meat, but I do eat fish. I don’t like dried beans—I’m not a vegetarian protein person. I make homemade yogurt every week. My gallon of farm milk is turned into delicious yogurt every single week, which I eat on a daily basis—maybe three-quarters of a cup—with wheat germ, and maybe with a local honey, but maybe not. I like Maine Grains oatmeal—cracked oats, not rolled oats. And I have my own eggs. I have the best eggs in the world from my chickens.
CM: What color are they?
MS: Oh, every color. I have a new Marans chicken that’s laying dark olive green eggs.
CM: I was sort of amazed to see that one of the first appearances we found of you in the pages of Vogue was in February 1983, right after you published Entertaining. You predicted at the time that more and more people were going to be paying attention to what is coming out of the ground, either from their own gardens or from the greengrocer. What do you think is the next big food trend that we’re gonna be seeing?
MS: I think it’s gonna continue to be as homegrown, as organic, as possible. It’s terribly important to get rid of all the pesticides. We’re now not allowed to use plastic cutting boards ’cause as you chop, the little tiny fragments of those plastics are going into your food. So you have to pay attention to all that. I just want everybody to be aware of such things, and to really pay attention to the health of the food that you are eating, cooking, serving to your family. It’s very important. It’s hard for me to eat bad food—very hard.
CM: What’s a recent example of when you had to eat bad food?
MS: Well, two weeks ago we went to a ranch in Wyoming, and the ranch—I will not mention the name of it—served us homegrown rabbit and homegrown goat and stuff like that. And we all came down with a rather serious bacterial infection. I’ve been sick for two weeks.
CM: Well, you look great.
MS: Well, it doesn’t make you look bad, it just makes you feel bad. In fact, my pants and skirts zip up much easier than they did two weeks ago. So it wasn’t that bad, but it was pretty horrible.
CM: I loved how open you were about your personal life in [your documentary]. I loved when you revealed that you kissed a stranger during evening mass in the Duomo in Florence during your honeymoon.
MS: Oh, there’s a funny story about that. Kevin Sharkey, who works with me, went to Florence. He was catching a plane coming back home from his vacation, and he went to see the Duomo, and there was a big, long line of American women trying to get in. And they recognized him and they called him over and said, “Is Martha here with you?” And he said, “No. What are you doing here?” And they said, “We’re looking for our kiss in the Duomo.” Isn’t that nice?
CM: The Italians were probably so confused. The film I think also reminded people that you were the OG influencer.
MS: And I’m a trad wife. I’m the original. I love trad wives. I’m going out to visit Ballerina Farm and Nara Aziza soon.
CM: What are you going to do with Ballerina Farms?
MS: I don’t know yet. I have to go see what she’s really up to. I wanna see if she really knows how to make yogurt and if she really knows how to milk a cow. No, I’m just going out to be friends. I think those girls have switched stuff around. I like it.
CM: I saw on your Instagram that you recently went to a Fashionphile x Assouline book party that was all about different bags, and there was a picture of you posing with a Birkin bag.
MS: My only Hermès pocketbook—we call ’em pocketbooks—and it’s a very beautiful one that my boyfriend bought in St. Bart’s for me a long time ago. I think he bought that in maybe 2001 or something like that. And I wore it to my trial every day. It didn’t bring me any good luck, but I wore it anyway, and so they have a picture of me carrying that with a Gucci blouse—I had a gray silk Gucci blouse on—and an Hermès coat and the Birkin bag. The bag, by the way, is now the second most famous Birkin bag after Jane Birkin’s own bag.
CM: Well, that’s good news for you, ’cause it just sold for $10 million.
MS: I know. I’ve already been offered a couple hundred thousand dollars for it. Someday I will auction it off for my hospital or for Acadia National Park or something. Something good.
CM: We have a video series called “What’s in Your Bag,” where people sort of go through the contents of their purse. What’s in Martha’s Birkin?
MS: Oh, it’s empty. It’s stuffed with tissue paper. I don’t use it anymore.
CM: What purse are you using on a day-to-day basis?
MS: I don’t use purses. I have a Bandolier with a magnetic pocketbook on it. I just carry one bill and several credit cards and my passport.
CM: What bill?
MS: $100, and maybe there’s a dollar in there too. And then you have to have your license, and you can now have your passport on a little card with your picture on it. So I have that and my Global Entry. And that’s it. That’s my pocketbook now.
CM: You have published 100 books.
MS: 101.
CM: 101. Do you still love entertaining?
MS: Oh, I do.
CM: What’s the most exciting thing you have been incorporating into a dinner party recently?
MS: Well, I started a restaurant out in Las Vegas—it’s gonna be three years old. And we do a smashed potato with crème fraîche and caviar, which couldn’t be simpler but it is so good. So that’s one thing that I’d like to serve. And everybody loves that, especially if you’re generous with the caviar.
CM: If you go to someone’s house for a party, what is the quickest sign of a good hostess or a bad hostess or host?
MS: The quickest sign is that the host or hostess introduces you to other people so you’re not just standing there wondering who to talk to. I think introductions and really guiding your guests around to other guests—especially somebody who you might be very interested in—is very nice.
CM: I love your motto that when you’re through changing, you’re through. How do you manage to keep growing and changing? Is there an example of how you feel you have changed in the last couple of years?
MS: Oh, I change all the time. Everybody says, “Oh, you’re reinventing yourself.” I hate the word reinvention because I’m not reinventing anything. I’m the same old person, but I am evolving, and I think evolution is sort of the best thing that one can do. It’s what is happening with the animal world. They’re fighting to survive. Evolution is really a survival of the fittest, of the smartest, and we have to realize that change is very good.
