Maggie Tabberer "Do something you love"

For 15 years, Maggie Tabberer was The Weekly’s doyenne of fashion. Of course, she was already a household star and here, with a new shoot to celebrate our 90th birthday, Maggie reminisces about her favourite photographer and a life of “luck and love”

- JULIET RIEDEN

Every morning without fail Maggie Tabberer fixes her make-up, dons her favourite jewels – currently the lush string of pearls with a boulder citrine clasp and matching citrine earrings that she is wearing in one of the poses for our photo shoot – and dresses for the day. The latter, she admits, comes with a little help from one of the two beloved carers who are with her for a couple of hours each day, and she accepts as a necessity in her autumn years. But at 86, while not as spritely as she once was, Maggie T still radiates the glamour, beauty and luminous presence that made her a household star for decades from the mid-1960s.

Indeed, as those pools of blue captivate the camera lens once more, high cheek bones cutting classic structure, hands elegantly draped about her chin, The Weekly’s team can’t help but sigh. Hands are tough to photograph, most people do awkward things with them, but Maggie is perfection our Style Director, Mattie Cronan, tells me.

It took some persuading for The Weekly favourite to agree to shades of pink for her cover Maggie’s wardrobe is famously monochrome – “black for the winter, white for the summer”, she quips – but she is surprised and thrilled with the results.

Maggie, of course, knows the power of a great photo. It launched her career and the man behind the camera was the brilliant Berlin-born photographer, Helmut Newton, who came into her life when she was a naïve 23-year-old married mother-of-two and later became her lover.