Martha Stewart’s breaking barriers with Sports Illustrated cover and that’s a good thing … right? | CBC News

At 81 years old, Martha Stewart has become the oldest cover star of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

The lifestyle and homemaking guru, whose four-decade business empire includes cookbooks, kitchenware, magazines, several TV shows and an unlikely professional relationship with rapper Snoop Dogg, wears a white one-piece swimsuit on the sports magazine’s famed annual issue. 

“For me, it is a testament to good living,” Stewart said of the photo shoot during an interview on Today on Monday. “I think that all of us should think about good living, successful living, and not about aging. The whole aging thing is so boring.”

Previously, 74-year-old Maye Musk — billionaire tech executive Elon Musk’s mother — held the record, having appeared on the magazine’s cover in 2022. Musk was among the famous women who praised Stewart’s cover, joining Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Garner and Lupita Nyong’o in commenting on her Instagram post.

Celebrity or not, “I think older women have been invisible for a very long time. You sort of age out of the public eye,” said Anna Murphy, a fashion editor at the London Times, in an interview with CBC News.

“It’s been refreshing and long overdue for women to stay in the public eye, to still be out there being seen on the covers of magazines [at] 81, not just 21 — that has to be a step forward.”

Older cover stars in fashion

Like Stewart and Musk, older women have been gracing fashion magazines more frequently in the last few years as brands like Vogue try to diversify their cover stars and neutralize criticisms of ageism.

For its April 2023 issue, Vogue Philippines made 106-year-old Indigenous tattoo artist Apo Whang-Od its cover star. Judi Dench was believed to be British Vogue’s oldest cover star when she posed for the magazine in 2020 at the age of 85.

MJ Day, the editor-in-chief of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the magazine has incorporated a wider diversity of ages into its cover choices partly in response to its growing female readership. 

“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,” Day told the paper.

CBC News reached out to Day for an interview but did not hear back.

Inclusive objectification

Murphy, who wrote Destination Fabulous, a book about embracing aging, said she’s thrilled that older women are being seen. But the narrative behind Stewart’s cover story is slightly more complicated than one of straightforward celebration, she added.

“I actually find it a little bit depressing in a way that that kind of body-bound objectification that younger women are typically subjected to is now something that we also have to kind of strive for in our later decades,” she said.

During the Today interview, Stewart spoke about preparing for the cover by upping her exercise regimen and cutting pasta and bread from her diet. “I didn’t starve myself,” she told the hosts.

“There shouldn’t be any limits. Set your limits higher than you think. Embrace the past but absolutely look towards the future and reimagine what you can do,” Stewart said.

“You can look great pretty much at any age if you put your mind to it.”

Tracy Isaacs, a professor of philosophy at Western University, wrote an article last year for The Conversation about the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and why the magazine’s inclusive covers can still be harmful to women, referring to it as “inclusive objectification.”

The reaction to Stewart’s cover is a testament to how women above a certain age are “thought to be written off in the attraction department,” she told CBC News.

In some ways, Sports Illustrated and other magazines including a wider diversity of ages, racial backgrounds and body types is a good thing, Isaacs said. 

She pointed to ESPN’s The Body Issue as an example of a sports publication that have made an effort to explore different body types — including those of older women — without sexualizing them, instead emphasizing their physical strength. 

“But I think overall, the swimsuit issue is not a good thing because the bottom line is still the objectification of women for a vast majority male, straight male audience,” she said. 

“It’s breaking barriers, yes. But are these the barriers we want to break?”

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