Martha Stewart Looks So Different In Throwback Pics From Her Modeling Days

The home-making mogul Martha Stewart has never been doubted as the queen of lifestyle, hospitality, cooking, gardening, and much more. The best-selling author has written 100 books on her craft as of early 2024, sharing valuable skills with domestically curious people all over the world. However, she didn't start in this business. What you never knew about Stewart is that she had a brief modeling career in her earlier years.

Her panache for home-making started when she and her then-husband Andrew Stewart bought and restored an antique, circa 1805 farmhouse in Connecticut in the 1970s. Her taking to the home renovation process was just a foreshadowing of her now successful business empire.

Stewart started a catering business in 1973 that launched her career in household management. From there, the domesticity dame's entrepreneurship brought her thriving TV shows, collections of home essentials with her name on them, best-selling cookbooks — and Stewart's prison stint for insider trading, but that's a story for another day. Before having a net worth of $400 million, the TV personality was a kid trying to support herself through college. The unique way she did so you can read about below.

Modeling was Martha Stewart's way of supplementing her scholarships while attending Barnard College in New York City. In an Instagram post on Stewart's business page, they featured a rare photo of the young beauty back in her modeling days. The caption said that modeling was one of Stewart's first jobs, leading to work in fashion campaigns and editorial spreads. "You might have even spotted her in ads for brands like Breck and Clairol back in the day," the post read.

During an interview for the 2013 PBS documentary "Makers: Women Who Make America", Stewart said, "I was lucky I was pretty enough to be a photography model." She explained how she moved from Ford Models to the Stewart Talent Agency, which worked out a schedule for her to work in between her classes.

The profile @HistoryThroughPhotos on Facebook posted a vintage swimsuit photo of Stewart, not a considerable difference from Stewart's 2023 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover photo, which resulted in her shutting down rumors of plastic surgery. "When I was a model and posing all the time in bathing suits and sporty sexy things, that's the time I should have been on a cover," Stewart told Variety, quipping, "But I wasn't a $75-an-hour model then. I was only a $50- and $60-an-hour model."