by LONDON — Symbolism is the language of fashion designers and executives. These so-called signals guide their decision-making.
The Magician, The High Priestess, The Hermit or The Sun – all Major Arcana cards in a tarot deck could easily be nicknames for those working in the fashion system not so dissimilar to the monitors given by an editorial director and legendary publisher of WWD, John. B. Fair. After all, he called Truman Capote The Tiny Terror; Aristotle Onassis as Daddy O, and Gloria Guinness as Grand Elegance were among the many nicknames he bestowed on people from designers to social celebrities.
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For the past two decades, psychic Dante Sabatino, otherwise known as Tarot by Dante, has been regarded by designers and celebrities as The Go To.
Gabriela Hearst, mystic-cum-designer, is one of them and she seeks his knowledge every year along with those in her circle.
“He’s on point and makes you write notes,” says the Uruguayan-born designer, referring to the fact that Sabatino doesn’t allow voice recordings of his sessions.
“It’s the way I was trained and I would be too self-conscious. I want to curse the table, I want to say what I want,” says the New York-based psychic in an interview from Paris.
He’s currently building up a client base in Paris – in true French fashion, he describes the French as the hardest to beat, but it’s a growing operation.
Sabatino offers in-person and Zoom readings. He often travels to markets where he has a strong clientele including Rome, New York, Los Angeles, Nantucket and London, where he will be this month.
“The WWD article [he was profiled in 2008] I brought a lot more fashion people. I read tons of people at Saks Fifth Avenue and L’Oréal. I started reading fashion celebrities and at one point I read Chanel’s,” he says, speaking with his hands. He wears a Sagittarius ring on his pinky finger – his sun and moon are in Sagittarius and he is rising in Virgo.
“The Rising of the Virgin makes me feel a little bit off,” he says.
He grew up between the suburbs and the inner city of Pennsylvania, calling himself a “city mouse”, and was educated at a private high school, then briefly studied fashion design in college before dropping out to enter in the world of retail in Philadelphia. . It was around this time that he started doing a lot of tarot reading.
Sabatino’s first fashion gig was in retail work at Laura Ashley and Laura Ashley Home.
“I worked on a really fun street in retail. I would go to the [local] bar and card reading. I became known as a reader in the neighborhood,” he says.
When his best friend moved from Philadelphia to New York, she encouraged him to charge for his readings and hosted a tarot party for him. He went up to the city to read every once in a while.
He moved to Laura Ashley’s Madison Avenue store in 1995, moving in with his best friend.
“I decided to supplement my income with tarot. I started working in public at The Big Cup cafe in the Chelsea neighbourhood. I worked on Tuesday and Wednesday nights for several years and then I started making house calls. I read clients to this day from my time in the cafe,” says Sabatino.
He learned how to read cards from his mother, a classical pianist, piano instructor and tarot reader. He would sit on her lap and watch her read cards – she gave him his first set of tarot cards at the age of 15. As an older teenager, Sabatino would often hang out with older female readers and did readings with them as a way to explore her craft.
He found a mentor in Georgia with whom he studied for more than five years to work on his technique and style.
Sabatino is currently on his fifth tarot deck. He sleeps with it to connect with its energy and turn the cards into a “pet rock,” he says.
Most tarot readers follow the Celtic spread in their reading, but Sabatino has developed his own template.
“I read in a pile of cards and each pile relates to a different part of someone’s psyche or life. I describe them [the cards] as psychic mirrors. They look into the psyche and meditate for me and I read the thoughts the way a doctor would read an MRI scan,” he says.
Sabatino uses the tarot deck created by AE Waite and P. Colman Smith in 1909. Publisher Taschen turned the famous decks into a collector’s box and book last year titled “The Tarot of AE Waite and P. Colman Smith.” Waite and Smith were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret occult society that was prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Despite reading for over four decades, he rarely does self-reading, nor does he visit other readers.
“It’s like giving yourself a massage or your own hair. My mom still reads and she’s in her 80s, sometimes I consult her, but for me, I’m very interested in astrology,” says Sabatino.
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