Trailblazing image consultant Pam Abeling recently returned to live in Pakenham.By Paul Dunlop
ANYBODY who thinks beauty is only skin deep hasn’t met Pam Abeling. The Pakenham woman has made a lifetime of bringing out the best in people.
As one of Australia’s original image consultants, Pam was doing makeovers long before they became the stuff of primetime television.
She has worked for many of Australia’s major corporations and helped more than 7000 people improve their dress sense and style.
Pam combines colour and grooming advice with life coaching to boost confidence and ensure people’s style skeletons remain safely locked in the closet.
ABC newsreader Ian Henderson, regarded by many as ‘the thinking woman’s sex symbol’, is just one of the personalities who owes his muchadmired look to Pam.
The daughter of the late legendary pharmacist Arch Munro and wife Pearl, Pam has recently returned to the district where she grew up and is offering her services to the people of Pakenham.
She said most people – with the right advice – could look twice as good as they do, without taking the route favoured by some of the extreme cases seen on TV.
“Most of us walk around looking about 50 per cent as good as we can,” Pam said.
“In terms of changing that, it’s not about spending a fortune on yourself, or having surgery or doing something drastic, it’s about knowing what works best for you and making the most of that.”
Pam said one of the keys to looking good is choosing the right combination of colours.
“There are some colours that really make you look terrific and really support you and there are other colours that quite frankly can make you look dreadful,” she said.
“When I first began, my father was one of the first people I did. I told him he looked good in pink.
“He made a comment like ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead in it,’ you know, the typical country pharmacist.
“It took a while, quite a few years later, mum bought him this beautiful deep pink shirt. At the end of the summer we had to surgically remove it from his back.”
While most men can just pull out the blue jumper and get by, women are in far more dangerous territory, Pam said.
Hair colour, makeup, clothing and accessories – so many decisions, each one crucial to the overall result.
“A girl can have everything right, then get the lipstick wrong and she’s blown the whole look.”
A mother of four (three daughters and one son), Pam’s life has always involved contact with people.
She became interested in image consulting at a time when it was almost unheard of outside the United States and was among the first few people trained in Australia.
Immaculately groomed and beautifully spoken, Pam embodies the advice she has given to business people, television stars and the staff of Australia’s top hotels.
Her affinity with style was perhaps inherited from her mother Pearl, regarded as one of the bestdressed women in the district. “Mum was the icon of fashion in Pakenham; she was extremely elegant and when they first came to town she kind of really stood out.”
Pam was 12 when her father began at the pharmacy and left four years later to work in the city.
As the years passed and her career grew, she owned and ran the South East Asian company of Always in Style International for six years.
She has appeared regularly on radio and in the print media.
Being paid to shop might seem like most women’s dream job, but Pam said it is also a lot of hard work.
These days, with everything in fashion ‘tight and tiny’, it can be tough for women to keep up with an increasingly difficult set of fashion principles.
Pam’s advice for people wondering how to look modern without ending up like famous fashion victims Kath and Kim is to keep it simple.
The secret, she said, is to know oneself.
“It’s a skill,” she said.
“It doesn’t take the pleasure out of shopping but it means you can go into a department store and not be overwhelmed and everything you buy is going to work for you.
“It is not about having lots of clothes, I personally don’t have a lot of clothes, but what I do have, everything works.”
When she came back to Pakenham, Pam said her jaw dropped at some of the changes that had taken place in recent times.
“I thought it was terrific, but it bore no relation to how I remembered the town of Pakenham,” she said.
Pam has pulled back from her work to take more time for herself and to further explore another string to her bow.
In tandem with her corporate career, she has been a practitioner of meditation and has released a number of CDs.
“They’re not meditations as people probably think of; they’re kind of guided, relaxing, soothing,” she said.
The family home in Ahern Road is an oasis of calm and tranquillity, set among lush gardens that give Pam a strong sense of her family’s connection with this area. Pam is looking forward to renewing ties with the area and has already been signed up to speak to Rotary Club members about her work.
Coming a generation before Carson Kresley of Queer Eye fame, Pam was a trailblazer in many ways.
It was a keenness to help people, particularly women, that got her into the industry. She sometimes thinks we, as a society, are in danger of becoming too image conscious and feels that many of the makeover shows we see on television are missing something.
“What I do isn’t like slapping something over the top of you and saying ‘that’s your image’.
“When you really get somebody’s image right, you’re actually working with who they are and then you represent that.
“You line them up physically or externally with who they are inside, you just make it better.”
