LONDON — Symbolism is the language of fashion designers and managers. It is these so-called signals that inform their decision-making.
The Magician, the High Priestess, the Hermit or the Sun – all the Major Arcana cards in the tarot deck can easily be nicknames for those working in the fashion system and are not much different from the nicknames given by John, the legendary editor-in-chief and publisher of WWD. B. Fairchild. After all, Truman called Capote the Little Terror; Aristotle Onassis as Daddy O, and Gloria Guinness as His Ultimate Elegance, among his numerous nicknames for people from designers to celebrities to social media.
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Over the past two decades, psychic Dante Sabatino, also known as Dante’s Tarot, has been considered The Go To by designers and celebrities.
Mystic and designer Gabriela Hearst is one of them, and together with those around her, she seeks her knowledge every year.
“He is careful and makes you write notes,” says the Uruguayan-born designer, implying that Sabatino does not allow audio recording of his sessions.
“I was trained that way and I would be too shy. I want to swear and hit the table, I want to say whatever I want,” says the New York-based medium in an interview in Paris.
It is currently growing its Parisian clientele; In true French fashion, he describes the French as the hardest to break, but this is a growing operation.
Sabatino offers in-person and Zoom readings. He frequently visits markets where he has a strong customer base, such as Rome, New York, Los Angeles, Nantucket and London, where he will be this month.
“WWD article [he was profiled in 2008] It brought me so many more fashionable people. I read tons of people at Saks Fifth Avenue and L’Oréal. “I started reading about famous fashion designers and at one point I read Chanel’s mind,” she says, talking with her hands. She wears a Sagittarius ring on her little finger; its sun and moon are in Sagittarius and its ascendant is in Virgo.
“Virgo Ascendant keeps me a little grounded,” she adds.
Raised between the suburbs and inner city of Pennsylvania, she called herself a “city mouse” and was educated at a private high school, then briefly studied fashion design in college before entering the world of retail in Philadelphia. . Around this time, he started doing many tarot readings.
Sabatino’s first fashion job was in retail working at Laura Ashley and Laura Ashley Home.
“I worked on a really fun avenue in retail. I would go there [local] Read the bars and cards. “I became known as a reader in the neighborhood,” he says.
When her best friend from Philadelphia moved to New York, she encouraged her to charge for readings and threw a tarot party for her. He would go to the city occasionally to study.
In 1995, Laura moved into Ashley’s Madison Avenue store and moved in with her best friend.
“I decided to supplement my income with tarot. I started working publicly at The Big Cup cafe in the Chelsea neighborhood. I worked Tuesday and Wednesday nights for a few years, then I started making house calls. “I still read about my customers from my time at the cafe to this day,” says Sabatino.
He learned card reading from his mother, who was a classical pianist, piano instructor and tarot reader. She would sit on his lap and watch him read cards; She gave him his first tarot cards when he was 15. As an older teenager, Sabatino would often hang out with and read with older female readers. discovering his craft.
To work on his technique and style, he found a mentor in Georgia with whom he worked for more than five years.
Sabatino is currently on her fifth tarot deck. He sleeps with her to connect with her energy and turn the cards into his “pet rock”.
Most tarot readers follow the Celtic spread when reading, but Sabatino has developed her own template.
“I read in stacks of cards, and each stack has a connection to a different part of the psyche or a different part of someone’s life. I am describing them [the cards] as psychic mirrors. “They look into the soul and they reflect back to me, and I read the reflections like a doctor reads an MRI scan,” he says.
Sabatino uses the tarot deck created in 1909 by A. E. Waite and P. Colman Smith. Publisher Taschen has turned the famous decks into a collectible box and released “The Tarot of AE Waite and P. Colman Smith” last year. Waite and Smith were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret occult society prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Although he has been reading for over forty years, he rarely reads to himself and does not visit other readers.
“It’s like giving yourself your own massage or haircut. My mother is still studying and in her 80s, so I consult her sometimes, but for my part, I’m very interested in astrology,” says Sabatino.
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