Mick Jagger’s favourite antiques dealer
Said to have been the first man
to wear flares on the King’s
Road, in 1961, and also to don
a kaftan, Christopher Gibbs, who has died aged 79, was a key figure in Swinging London, said The Daily Telegraph. A dandy, antiques dealer and aesthete, he created the decadent sets for Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s 1970 film Performance; and squired its star, his friend Mick Jagger, around the stately homes of England. (Gibbs taught Jagger “how to be a gentleman”, the rock star once confessed.) Known for his erudition and personal warmth, he was the pioneer of a hugely influential “distressed bohemian” style: spending much of his time in North Africa, he brought back rugs and wall hangings, which he mixed up with grand but tattered English furniture, Chinese ceramics, fine paintings and exquisite objects from all over the world. The look was expensive and difficult to pull off, but his aim, he said, was simply “to help people make nice, cosy homes where they are going to live happy, beautiful lives... No, it’s not tongue-in-cheek. I mean it.”
Christopher Gibbs was born in 1938 into a family that had made its fortune in the guano industry. (“Mr Gibbs/ Made his dibs/ Selling the turds/ Of foreign birds”, as the rhyme had it.) He was sent to Eton, where – aged 14 – he was seen sporting velvet slippers and a monocle; at 15, he was expelled for “drinking, panty raids of other boys’ rooms – that sort of thing”. After national service, he arrived in Chelsea to join a louche set that gathered around the Markham Arms, said The Times. He confessed to being “monumentally narcissistic” as a young man, capable of spending 40 minutes on the phone to a friend discussing which kipper tie to wear. The Stones and others gathered to smoke dope and drop acid at his home in Cheyne Walk (where the party scene in Antonioni’s Blow-up was filmed); he came up with the album title Beggars Banquet; and in 1967, he was present at the famous police raid on Keith Richards’s house in Sussex. But though Gibbs took copious drugs in the 1960s, he liked to point out that he always got up for work in the morning.
He’d made his first trip to Tangier in 1958, aged 20, and returned with an assortment of fabrics that he used to stock his newly opened antiques shop, in Islington, along with furniture and paintings that he acquired through his aristocratic connections. His clients later included John Paul Getty Jr and Lord Rothschild. After years living in the family home, the Manor House in Clifton Hampden, Oxfordshire, he auctioned off his stock and retired to Tangier, where he was a pillar of the local Anglican church, St Andrew’s. A visiting friend said Gibbs wore “wonderful kaftans”, adding: “And he looked like Moses walking in the olive garden – very peaceful.” He is survived by his partner, the actor turned antiques dealer Peter Hinwood.