Australia’s first supermodel Maggie Tabberer has died aged 87. Maggie’s daughter, stylist and author Amanda Tabberer, posted the news to her Instagram account today.
“This morning we lost our beautiful mother and Nanna,” the post says. “She was an icon in every sense of the word and we will miss her dearly … Along with the rest of Australia. Rest in peace Nanna. We love you to bits forever.”
Maggie rose to national attention working with photographer Helmut Newton before becoming a television personality and two-time Gold Logie winner. She worked at The Australian Women’s Weekly and launched the clothing label Maggie T. Her 1998 autobiography, Maggie, capturing her independent spirit, became a bestseller.
Maggie died five days before her 88th birthday.
Australia’s first supermodel Maggie Tabberer in 2017.Credit:
For many Australians Maggie’s slick hair, imperious gaze, powerful frame and billowing minimalist outfits represented chic, long before they knew how to use the word correctly. Her style signature was as impressive and intimidating as Anna Wintour’s with her bob and sunglasses, enhanced in later years with dramatic turbans.
Raised as Margaret in Adelaide, where she married car dealer Charles Tabberer at 17, the father of her two daughters, Amanda and Brooke, her good looks and ambition were never going to be satisfied by courses at a modelling school in Rundle Street.
After moving to Melbourne, her profile rose alongside German-born photographers Henry Talbot and Helmut Newton. It was the association with Newton that would make her Maggie, and then Vogue Australia’s first local cover star in 1961.
“Helmut would yell at you,” Tabberer told me in 2016. “He would tell you to raise your left eyebrow a fraction just to get the shot.
“Helmut was always going to be the star. I modelled for Henry, but was Helmut’s girl.”
The cover helped lift Tabberer’s profile, leading to constant work for magazines, the Australian Wool Board and department stores.
“I was a little housewife, and suddenly, there I was on the cover of Vogue … it was a huge deal for me and quite pivotal in terms of other work coming in. I was divorced and had two little girls to look after by myself,” Tabberer told Vogue in 2019.
Not long after moving to Melbourne her first of two husbands had returned to Adelaide.
When Newton left Australia to pursue international work and eventual fame, Tabberer stayed behind to raise her daughters. “I had two little girls who were totally dependent on me ... I knew that it wouldn’t work,” she wrote in her autobiography.
Instead, Maggie moved to Sydney and into media with newspaper columns and television work, becoming the entrancing face and seductive voice of fashion in this country.
“Growing up I would read her columns and hang off every word,” says former Vogue editor and author Kirstie Clements.
“It’s pretty difficult to hold a candle to Maggie. I don’t think we’ve seen anyone quite like her since.
“She was so elegant and a style icon who was loved by everyone, not just the elite. All Australians admired her. Being in Maggie’s presence and having her call you ‘darling’ was the best feeling in the world.”
On television’s Beauty and the Beast, her own talk show Maggie and in countless shoots for The Australian Women’s Weekly, where she worked as fashion editor for 15 years from 1981, she remained the embodiment of class. Even in 2006, my friends in Cowra, NSW would refer to flicking the collar of their starched linen shirt up as “doing a Maggie”.
She was a regular fixture at AWW, appearing most recently on the magazine’s cover in September last year for its 90th anniversary, still exuding power with her commanding gaze directed from beneath another dashing turban.
The magazine’s style director Mattie Cronan worked closely with Maggie on the rose-tinted cover shot. A rose not quite in full-bloom, but still achingly beautiful.
“Maggie was reluctant at first to break away from her signature monochrome palette,” Cronan remembers. “‘I will only do this for you,’ she said.”
After the shoot Maggie phoned Deborah Hutton, the former model and television presenter who took over her role as fashion editor at AWW.
“‘She phoned to say ‘darling can you believe that they had me in pink’,” Hutton remembers. “Then she paused and added ‘But, oh my god, it was rather fab!’ with that incredible laugh.”
Hutton was one of Maggie’s favourite models for the fashion shows she organised in the eighties through her public relations company.
“She liked me because I had big hair,” Hutton says. “But she showed me what a model could go on and do in life. She was funny, poised, worked hard and could swear with the height of elegance. There will never be another Maggie.”
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