Big, Bold, and Beautiful: The Rise of Maggie T Larger-sized Fashion Amid the Decline of Australia’s Clothing Industry in the 1980s

As calls to revive Australian clothing manufacturing gather momentum today, much might be learned from companies that successfully navigated market segmentation in the 1980s, a volatile period in Australia’s economic and manufacturing history. This article offers a counterpoint to bleak portrayals of deindustrialisation that dominate most accounts of clothing manufacturing in this period. Adopting a cultural economic history lens and utilising oral histories, memoirs, and archival sources, the article investigates regional Victorian firm Maurice C Dowd Pty Ltd, that survived into the new millennium by tapping new markets. A key to Dowd’s resilience was launching the Maggie T label in 1981 in collaboration with former fashion model, Maggie Tabberer. Incredibly, this label was the first to target mature, plus-sized women in Australia. Identifying this market gap allowed the firm to pivot away from price-sensitive production for youthful, mainstream consumers, which had dominated fashion manufacturing since the 1960s.