Martha Stewart

Before she was a one-woman media empire, Martha Stewart — born Martha Kostyra in Jersey City in 1941 — had already been a teenage model, a Wall Street stockbroker, and, starting in 1976, a caterer whose parties got her noticed. Her first book, Entertaining, published in 1982, made her a lifestyle authority; a mass-market partnership with Kmart in the late 80s put her name in every discount aisle in America. But the empire truly began in late 1990, when Time Publishing Ventures launched Martha Stewart Living — a magazine built entirely around one person's impossibly composed vision of home life. It debuted with a circulation of 250,000 and would eventually top two million copies an issue.

The 90s belonged to her. The Martha Stewart Living TV show arrived in 1993 as a weekly half hour and grew with demand — daily by 1997, a full hour by 1999 — teaching America to stencil, glaze, prune, and pipe. "It's a good thing," her signature benediction, became a national catchphrase, endlessly parodied and imitated; Martha herself leaned into the joke even as she built the business with unsentimental precision. In September 1997 she bought her brand out from Time, consolidating everything — magazine, show, merchandising — into Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

The capstone came on October 19, 1999, when MSLO went public on the New York Stock Exchange: the stock more than doubled on its first day, from $18 to $38, and Stewart was widely described as the first self-made female billionaire in the United States. The 2000s brought the fall — a stock-trading scandal and a five-month federal prison sentence in 2004 — and then one of the great celebrity comebacks. But the 90s Martha is the one seared into memory: the calm voice, the perfect pie crust, and the suspicion that somewhere she was judging your centerpiece.