Ageless style defied the career-limiting odds of the fashion industry

MAGGIE TABBERER: 1936 -2024

With her scraped-back hair, flowing white linen outfits and silk scarf draped insouciantly over one shoulder, fashion doyenne Maggie Tabberer epitomised Australian style and sophistication. The former model, fashion editor, broadcaster and entrepreneur rose from humble beginnings in Adelaide to the very top of the fashion tree, after being spotted by the great photographer Helmut Newton when she was a 23-year-old mother of two young daughters.

Maggie Tabberer at the Veuve Clicquot awards in 2006.Credit: Jacky Ghossein

Models have a famously short shelf life so, aged 25, tiring of exhortations to lose weight and unwilling to move to Paris, where she knew she would struggle with childcare, Tabberer chose to reinvent her career instead.

In the 1960s, her role on the television panel show Beauty and the Beast turned her into a household name, leading to her own chat show Maggie, for which she won two consecutive Gold Logies in 1970 and 1971.

In 1967, she launched her own PR company, Maggie Tabberer and Associates, which she ran for 20 years, complete with a glittering client list. She also wrote a fashion column, Maggie Says, for the Daily Mirror (Sydney) for 16 years before she was poached by Kerry Packer, who appointed her to the plum position of fashion editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1981, a role she held for 15 years.

“Like most of today’s top-line models, lovely Adelaide-born Margaret Tabberer follows her career ‘star’ from city to city, 1961.”Credit: Fairfax

Although her regal bearing and immaculate appearance could have been intimidating, her warm, confiding tones and down-to-earth manner endeared her to a nation of women. This was most evident when, in 1985, readers of the Weekly voted her and Ita Buttrose their two preferred candidates to be prime minister.

Margaret May Trigar was born on December 11, 1936, in Parkside, Adelaide, to Molly and Alfred Trigar. Margaret – as she was then – was the youngest of five children; Ron, Joan, Betty and Nancy. Although the family were very poor – Ron worked as a groundsman at the Adelaide Oval – it was a close, happy, raucous family.

Margaret had an early eye for style and later recalled that she refused to go to school unless her ribbon matched her dress. When she was 14, she was spotted by a photographer at her sister’s wedding, which led to occasional jobs in fashion parades. She later attended modelling school on Rundle Street, where she learnt the essential art of deportment.

Maggie Tabberer in a Shannon Originals beach coat, 1960.Credit: Fairfax

Keen to move on in the world, she quickly married Charles Tabberer when she was 17. He was 20 years older, owned a car yard and seemed very glamorous and grown up. She and Charles had two daughters, Brooke and Amanda.

She was fitting in occasional modelling jobs in Adelaide alongside caring for her daughters when a friend passed some photographs of her to the legendary German-Australian photographer Helmut Newton. Tabberer flew over from Adelaide to meet Newton in Melbourne – not before first cooking and freezing Charles’ dinners and dropping Brooke and Amanda at her mother’s.

Happily, Newton pronounced the photographs to be “wonderful, just wonderful!” and took her under his wing, launching her career in the process.

“In those days they used to take Polaroids, so you could see what you looked like, and those images were so sexy, like nothing I’d ever been in before,” she said. “For instance, I’ve never smoked in my life but Helmut loved me to have a cigarette in some of the shots, sometimes in a long sleek holder. That was something that he really loved. I felt like Greta Garbo, it was all so European.”

In 1960, she was crowned model of the year and moved to Sydney, going on to feature on the cover of Vogue Australia and fashion magazines across Australia and New Zealand.

The marriage to Charles didn’t last – his business was in difficulty and, although his wife was “working, working, working” to support them, he became resentful of her success. After her marriage ended, Tabberer had an affair with Newton, who was married, something which she said, “didn’t sit easy with me but was very enjoyable”.

By the age of 25, she could already see the limitations of modelling, yet retained her fiercely ambitious and independent streak, knowing that, as a single mother, she must find lucrative opportunities to provide for her daughters.

In 1964, she made her debut on the panel talk show Beauty and the Beast as the Beauty to Eric Baume (until 1965) and then Stuart Wagstaff’s Beast. This transformed her career, leading to her own award-winning chat show, Maggie, and freelance presenting roles for the ABC and 2GB.

Serendipitously, Newton introduced her to her second husband, Ettore Prossimo, an Italian restaurateur, whom she married at the Wayside Chapel in 1967. Tragically, their son, Franceschino, died just 10 days after he was born from SIDS, a cot death, later that year. This devastated Tabberer, who told 2GB in 2021 she was “a mess. Like anyone who loses a child, you’re not supposed to bury your children. It was a year before I slept through the night.”

Although she and Prossimo – who she observed wryly “loved the ladies” – eventually divorced after 17 years together, they rekindled their friendship before he died in 1998 of a heart attack.

When she joined The Australian Women’s Weekly, as well as being the public face of the magazine and fronting its advertising campaigns, she brought a new confidence and style to the fashion pages, championing emerging Australian designers and becoming the driving force behind the Weekly’s Australian Fashion Awards, which won a high distinction at the International Emmy Awards in 1982.

Maggie Tabberer, fashion editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly, on a fashion shoot with photographer Greg Barrett in 1987.Credit: Fairfax

Tabberer was recognised by the fashion industry with several significant awards. In 1985, she became the first woman to win the Sir Charles McGrath marketing award, and the year after received the recognition of excellence award by the Fashion Group of Melbourne and the Advance Australia award for her achievements in fashion. In 1986, she was picked to design the ANZ Banking Corporation’s corporate uniforms.

Inspired by her own frustration at never finding any fashionable clothes to fit her, she launched Maggie T, a fashion chain for plus-size women, in 1981; it grew to 28 stores across some of Australia’s most salubrious suburbs, including Bondi in Sydney and Brighton in Melbourne.

Although she felt the label had started to change attitudes, there was still a way to go for the rest of the fashion industry. “I still think that they perhaps don’t acknowledge the importance of the market … I sometimes think that the fully figured woman is still seen as a third-class citizen [by larger department stores]. [Her section is] down the back … around by the dunny,” she told the Herald in 1996.

By 1990, she was back on the nation’s screens with ABC lifestyle program The Home Show, co-hosted with her then-partner, journalist Richard Zachariah. The program was a ratings hit but faced criticism for being elitist, something that Zachariah countered in a Herald interview.

Maggie Tabberer and Richard Zachariah at the 1990 Melbourne Cup.Credit: Fairfax

“Some people said we were showing houses that Australians couldn’t afford, but we got more letters from viewers saying, ‘I live in a fibro house and I’ll never be able to live in the houses we see on the program, but I want to dream so don’t dare take them off,’ ” he said.

Tabberer then became the face of the FX Channel with the Maggie at Home with series, in which she interviewed and scrutinised the interiors of everyone from Blanche D’Alpuget to Ian Thorpe. This then evolved into Maggie with, a show in which she interviewed famous Australians such as Kylie Kwong, Tracy Grimshaw and Jackie Weaver in their homes, for the Bio channel.

In 1998, she was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to the fashion industry and charitable causes. She published her bestselling autobiography Maggie in the same year – a frank account of her life that included honest descriptions of her relationships with men.

Her former partner of a decade, Zachariah, complained that people crossed the street to avoid him after reading about his part in their split because “breaking up with Maggie was like breaking up with the Queen Mother”. The book was described by a Herald reviewer as “rather like having a wonderful long conversation with a much lived and much loved female friend … No wonder her friends, and her audience, love her.”

Maggie Tabberer at the Stuart Wagstaff Memorial at the MLC Centre in Sydney, 2015.Credit: James Brickwood

Despite working in fashion and broadcasting – two industries that have a notorious habit of chewing women up and spitting them out after they reach a certain age – Tabberer was remarkable for her longevity, continuing to grace the cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly throughout her later years; her last appearance was just before her 85th birthday.

In 2021, she joined fashion greats Carla Zampatti, Collette Dinnigan and Akira Isogawa when she was honoured with a star on Paddington’s Walk of Style, at the intersection of Glenmore Road and Oxford Street.

Despite her stellar career and glamorous life, when asked how she would like to be remembered, she said, simply: “As a good mother, a good grandmother and a good friend.”

Maggie Tabberer is survived by her daughters Brooke and Amanda and her grandson, Marco.

Amy Ripley