How Adelaide’s Maggie Tabberer became – and remains – our Queen of Style
Elegant as ever in her 80s, Adelaide’s Maggie Tabberer is still the nation’s queen of style.
Confidential
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Maggie Tabberer needs no introduction.
Born in Adelaide, at Parkside, she’s been a household name as a pioneer and icon of Australian fashion for decades.
So much so, that this week when expat US InStyle editor Laura Brown was named the 2019 Australian Fashion Laureate – the industry’s highest accolade – she dedicated the award to Tabberer, saying it was an honour to be in her company.
Known and loved as Maggie T – like Madonna and Cher, she’s that famous – Tabberer was also a finalist.
She was short-listed thanks to her long contribution to the growth and promotion of the Australian fashion industry.
Discovered at 23 by legendary photographer Helmut Newton, Maggie T became his muse and Australia’s first supermodel.
She went on to work in television and ran a public relations company, Maggie Tabberer & Associates, for two decades, famously becoming the fashion editor and face of the Australian Women’s Weekly for 15 years in the 1980s and ’90s.
Then there was her Maggie T clothing line in 1981 – a designer label for women with curves long before it was a thing.
A name for more than half a century, many thought Maggie T was robbed of the Australian Fashion Laureate – herself included; she admitted, jokingly, to being “a bit shitty I didn’t win”. But, as always, Maggie T was gracious, saying she was thrilled to have been among the finalists, who also included the late Bernie Leser, the founder of Vogue Australia.
“It is just because I have been around since God was an infant,” Maggie T, who turns 83 in December, says of being revered, respected and admired in the industry. “The Australian public have always been gorgeous with me. I value that. When you get to my age, it is a lot of years. I am sort of a bit like Vegemite.”
One of five children, Maggie T grew up “on the end of the hand-me-downs”, before becoming this country’s style queen.
A close friend of George Gross & Harry Who designers, Adelaide’s George Gross and the late Harry Watt, Maggie T knows what she likes when it comes to Australian fashion.
“Sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it,” Maggie T says.
“I don’t like flashy clothes. Simplicity always works better. I think women get more wear out of buying a simple black dress. It is an old adage that has been going for one thousand years, I guess, and I still think it works.”
But while she may love less-is-more dressing, as a fashion editor she wanted to break the rules.
“I used to get into trouble a bit with my higher editors because I liked a certain style of photography and I liked to group girls together as I felt they looked better on the page than one single girl standing there in one outfit,” she says. “And so I tried to put a variety into the pages so there was something for everyone.”
Recognising she is still an influential voice in the industry, Maggie T is putting her support behind the push for more diversity on the runway.
“I don’t like them walking up and down the catwalk looking as though they need a good feed and I think it is fundamentally unhealthy,” she says.
“I don’t think people want that anymore either. It is changing; there are now agencies that have larger-sized models and they are doing very well.”
Counting her daughters Brooke and Amanda as her greatest achievements, Maggie T retired from public life a decade ago. At the time she was hosting Foxtel’s Maggie … At Home With, in which she interviewed prominent Australians.
Foxtel’s Brian Walsh had wanted to “keep the door open”, such was the program’s popularity. That it was so successful for seven years was hardly surprising. Breaking into TV on Beauty and the Beast in the 1960s, Maggie T won back-to-back Gold Logies in the early ’70s for her own TV chat show Maggie.
It was the first time anyone had won consecutive Gold Logies.
But while she forged a path for women at a time when the magazine and television business was driven by men, Maggie T plays down her push for equality.
“That is up to the individual,” she says.
“You are either going to accept that you are going to be treated oddly as a second-class citizen or you can make your own stand and make your own way in life.
“I think people respect you more.”