This article considers the ways in which lifestyle media during the 1980s expressed a longing for a particular form of social life that was passing as neoliberalism presented increasingly consumer-oriented and individualistic modes of life. It frames Martha Stewart’s lifestyle books, and other lifestyle television programs in the 1980s, as predecessors of the logic of the makeover and reality programming discussed by current media scholars. In particular, Stewart’s first two books, Entertaining (1982) and Quick Cook (1983), substituted displays of laborious domesticity and material abundance for lived social relations. The article, therefore, anchors contemporary discussions of lifestyle television and neoliberalism with a historical investigation of how neoliberalism was articulated to lifestyle and came to dominate media texts, and relatedly social life, in the 1980s.
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