Maggie Tabberer, the definition of Australian style and elegance dies aged 87
She was positively regal. Tall, strong and beautiful, she was given to calling everyone ‘darling’. Kind and gracious, she was the nation’s first supermodel but went on to a stellar career in publishing and fashion design.
To define Australian elegance, why go further than photographs of the magnificent Maggie Tabberer, who died on Friday, at the age of 87?
Elegant? She was positively regal. Tall, strong and beautiful, she was given to calling everyone “darling”. Kind and gracious, she had a work ethic like you would not believe.
Born Margaret Trigar on December 11, 1936, “Maggie T” was married for the first time at age 17 to a very lucky South Australian car dealer called Charles Tabberer.
They had two children, Brooke and Amanda, and Maggie was for a time settled into the life of a housewife. She was scouted out for some modelling jobs by a photographer at her sister’s wedding (she’d been doing a bit of catwalk on the side; the good people of Adelaide will have to forgive this, but there was simply no way the Rundle Mall was ever going to contain her talent.)
She travelled to Melbourne, where she found Helmut Newton – a German Jew who had fled Berlin after Kristallnacht – taking pictures of slender girls for Georges, the up-market department store.
Maggie was hardly cut from that cloth. She had coathanger shoulders, yes, but she also had a bit of hip to her, a bit of boob, a bit of thigh, a bit of va-va-vavoom. Newton, who would go on to become one of the most famous fashion photographers in the world, was bewitched.
In her memoir, Maggie wrote: “He liked big, tall girls who had knowing looks” and boy, didn’t she give him one. At their first meeting at his Melbourne home, they formed “an incredibly special connection, which I think came out in the pictures … I absolutely adored him.”
A short time later, she became the first local model to appear on the cover of Australian Vogue.
Hardly anyone knew she was, by then, a separated mother of two.
Her professional and personal relationship with Newton ended when he took off for New York. Before he left, he introduced her to a dashing restaurateur, Ettore Prossimo, who became Maggie’s second husband. They had a son, Francesco; and had to deal with tragedy, when he died just ten days after he was born, a victim of the “cot death” that plagued Australian babies in the 1960s.
Maggie worked through her grief. She started a public relations company that bore her name; she became a “beauty” on Beauty and the Beast; she had a fashion column in the Daily Mirror; and, in time, she was asked to host her own TV show, for which she won the Gold Logie not once, but twice, back-to-back, in 1970 and 1971.
In 1981, she accepted Kerry Packer’s offer to become fashion editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly. By her first issue, she was already the cover star.
Maggie encouraged Australian women to lean into their naughty side, with features like “Devil or Angel”.
“Ever feel you’re two different women?” she wrote, in one such column. “To be an outright little devil, add a leopard, tiger or knockout zebra print” to an otherwise demure black skirt.
She was dismayed by so many of the cheapskate choices offered to women of a certain size, and in the 1980s went into business with a clothing manufacturer Carl Dowd, whose father had owned Hickory Bras. Photographed for The Bulletin ahead of the launch of Maggie T, the label, she wore a man-style suit, and what would become her signature, slicked back hair. She promised “no tents” and “no mumsy prints” and within weeks they had orders totalling $2 million (Myer alone ordered $1m, at the time the largest ever order by a department store).
Maggie stayed with the business, and the Weekly, for 15 years, before leaving in the 1990s to present The Home Show on the ABC with Richard Zachariah, who was her partner for a time.
She released a memoir in 1998, and she was back on the Weekly cover as recently as 2023, telling journalist Juliet Reiden that she still liked to put on make-up and pearl earrings every morning, accepting only “a little help from one of the two beloved carers who are with her for a couple of hours each day … a necessity in her autumn years”.
She remained a luminous presence, shining from the cover in a familiar turban, worn with a silk dress, a cuff, and silver ballet flats.
Maggie’s daughter Amanda announced her death on Instagram, saying: “She was an icon in every sense of the word … we will miss her dearly, along with the rest of Australia.”
Tributes flowed like fine champagne. KerriAnne Kennerley said: “You paved the way for so many women.” Angela Bishop described her as “extraordinary” and Amanda Keller noted her genuine kindness.
Look closely though, and one word kept coming up in the comments: elegance. She’d have been 88 next week, and she still had it, in spades.
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