Celebrity3 min(s) read
Martha Stewart responds after deleting 'offensive' Halloween costume picture following huge online backlash
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Martha Stewart has deleted a Halloween photo from her Instagram after dressing as a homeless person while promoting her line of QVC candles in the same post.
The image, which was screenshotted and shared widely before it was removed, showed the 85-year-old in ripped jeans and a torn sweater with dirt smeared across her face, holding a clipboard sign that read 'I AM HUNGRY HELP ME!!' Two dogs sat on a porch beside her.
The caption on the carousel, which also included photos of candles, read: "My QVC candles are perfect for Halloween!!!"
A woman with an estimated net worth of $400 million dressed as someone who cannot afford to eat, in a post designed to sell luxury candles. The internet took roughly four minutes to arrive at a verdict.
The backlash
It started on Instagram and spread quickly to X and Reddit, where a thread in the r/popculturechat community drew hundreds of comments.
'Martha Stewart absolutely tone deaf and totally out of touch,' one user wrote.
'What on earth was Martha Stewart thinking with that Halloween outfit,' said another.
'Martha Stewart dressed up as a homeless person for Halloween and then deleted it. That's a sentence I didn't expect to type today.'
Others called the costume 'offensive', 'gross', and 'out of touch'.
The recurring theme was not just the costume itself but the fact that it appeared alongside a sales pitch for candles, which made the whole thing look less like a creative choice and more like someone who genuinely did not understand why it was a problem.
Screenshots of the post continued to circulate long after it was taken down.
Stewart's response
On Sunday, Stewart issued a statement to Page Six.
"I am distressed that my Halloween costume yesterday, which was intended to bring more awareness to the very serious subject of homelessness, has offended people, which was never my intention."
She added: "Homelessness continues to remain one of America's greatest challenges and ongoing crises, something that I care deeply about."
She said she was 'committed to continuing to make a difference'.
The awareness defence is a familiar one.
It is the go-to explanation when someone famous does something involving poverty, illness, or hardship and gets called out for it.
Whether dressing up as a hungry person for a candle advert constitutes 'raising awareness' or simply using someone's suffering as a costume that can be taken off at the end of the night is a question Stewart's statement did not address directly.
Why it hit differently this year
The timing made it worse.
America is in the middle of an affordability crisis. Grocery prices have risen for the fourth consecutive year.
Housing costs are at record levels in most major cities. Homelessness has increased by double digits in multiple states since 2024.
Against that backdrop, one of the wealthiest women in America put on torn clothes, smeared dirt on her face, held up a sign begging for food, and used the image to sell candles.
Even people who would normally defend a celebrity's right to wear whatever they want for Halloween struggled to find a line of reasoning that made this one work.
Stewart did not delete her Facebook version of the post, which was still live on Sunday.
She was also back on Instagram by Sunday morning with a new post about saffron. The crisis, it appears, has been absorbed and moved past.
The costume has been deleted, but the screenshots survive.