Michael Roberts
Impish ‘Jean Cocteau of the fashion world’ and jack-of-all-trades who loved to prick pretension
MICHAEL ROBERTS, who has died of a brain aneurysm aged 75, was a ubiquitous, glittering talent on the fashion scene as a journalist, illustrator, stylist, filmmaker, author and photographer – and a rare black British voice in the fashion media; Tina Brown, with whom he worked for many years, initially as art director of Tatler, described him as “the Jean Cocteau of the fashion world”.
Over six ft tall and handsome, with chiselled cheekbones, Roberts was elegant and waspish – and combined a deep knowledge of fashion with a satirist’s irreverence for its pretensions.
He made waves in the 1970s as a journalist at the Sunday Times when he took the veteran war photographer Don Mccullin with him to the Paris collections, described a Bill Gibb confection in tartan, lace and fur as looking like the Loch Ness Monster coming down the catwalk, and remarked, of a collection by Adrian Cartmell that had been dubbed “throwaway chic”, “some of it is indeed chic... [however], much should be thrown away.”
In the rarefied world of haute couture, Roberts once observed, one could, with luck, “look like a badly wrapped parcel for over $10,000.”
Moving on to Tatler, he continued to stir things up with subversive fashion shoots that poked fun at the lifestyles of the magazine’s traditional readers. There was a spoof debutante ball (where Emily and Araminta shared furs and tiaras with Justin and George), a shoot at Eton including a photograph of a fourth-former with “I must not w--k in bed” written on his face – and a 1989 cover featuring Vivienne Westwood dressed as Margaret Thatcher.
Nicholas Coleridge, who worked at the magazine at the same time, recalled Roberts’s gift for caustic “spine-lines” (mottos along the magazine’s binding only visible to the most determined reader) – such as “the magazine that bites the hand that feeds it”.
Roberts’s roles over the years included fashion and style director at Vanity Fair (where he had followed Tina Brown from Tatler), and as fashion director of The New Yorker (also under Brown), where, in a cover from 1997 titled “Head Over Heels,” he created a collage depicting models in vertiginously high stilettos - sporting walking sticks and bandages for their ankles.
There were, in addition, stints as design director of British Vogue (he also worked as a photographer and illustrator for just about every Vogue worldwide), Paris director of
Vanity Fair, and contributing editor of
Conde Nast Traveller.
Roberts published several books, illustrated with his own collages, notably
Fashion Victims: The Catty Catalogue of Stylish Casualties, from A-Z (2008), which included the following squib: “The Fashion World, it’s often said,/ Has wasted space inside its head./and when it comes to introspection/ Prefers a mirror for reflection.”
Fashion, for Roberts, was never “Absolutely Fabulous”.
Michael Roy Roberts was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire on October 2 1947 to an English mother, who worked as a secretary, and an engineer father, originally from St Lucia, who died in 1960 when Michael was 13. He was reticent about his childhood: asked in 1998 where his parents fitted into his upbringing, he replied “They don’t. I’m a loner.”
In 2007 he told the Telegraph’s then fashion features editor Justine Picardie that he had attended many different boarding schools: “My mother was always shuttling me to different schools - I must have been to about ten... I moved from school to school to school. I’d go on hunger strike.” The exception, he told another interviewer, was a school where “the day I arrived, a boy hung himself. Interestingly enough, I started out loathing it and ended up loving it. You owed nothing to anyone. You only survived through your own wits but if you survived, you knew you had made it.”
He went on to High Wycombe College of Art, where he swapped from fine art to graphics, and then to fashion, and won an ad agency illustration competition, for which the prize was a trip to New York. There he met Andy Warhol and the photographer Richard Avedon, and had drawings published in Women’s Wear Daily.
Back in London, in 1969 Molly Parkin, the fashion editor of the Sunday Times, took him on as her assistant. When a regular writer fell ill, he filled in so brilliantly that he was awarded a weekly catwalk commentary slot, and expanded his journalism from there.
Harold Evans, the paper’s editor, introduced Roberts to his girlfriend (later wife) Tina Brown. When in 1979 she was hired to revamp Tatler, she poached Roberts and installed him as fashion editor. Over the next five years, with the help of star photographers including Norman Parkinson, Helmut Newton and David Bailey, and his own subversive take on fashion and high society, Roberts created the magazine’s sexy new visual style.
It was at Tatler, too, that he took up photography, first for fashion and ads, then for portraits and people, pioneering the sort of now-familiar imagery of winsome models (male and female) in black lace, with crucifixes and gravestones and crowns of thorns as accessories – an aesthetic that influenced everyone from Mario Testino to Madonna. Nicholas Coleridge described him as a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel: “He glides through fashionland like a stealth bomber, flying low and missing nothing.”
When Tina Brown decamped to Vanity Fair in 1985, she took Roberts with her, but as she recalled, he did not like New York: “It was the first place he felt his blackness – when taxis wouldn’t pick him up.” He returned to Europe as Vanity Fair’s Paris editor and as a style director for Condé Nast, but after she was appointed editor of The New Yorker in 1992, she hired Roberts again to direct its regular fashion editions.
It was there that he started doing collage; colleagues recalled his wielding the scissors with “a puddle of clippings at his feet”, one cover collage featuring the Statue of Liberty laced into a tight corset.
On leaving The New Yorker, he returned as contributing fashion and style editor to
Vanity Fair, provoking outrage in 2008 with a cover featuring photographs by Annie Leibovitz of the then 15-year-old Miley Cyrus with a bare back, which were denounced by some critics as little short of kiddie porn. Roberts dismissed the criticisms as “ridiculous,” and “sour grapes from other magazines”.
In the 1980s Roberts took up film directing, with the MTV award-winning music video Limbo (1987) for Bryan Ferry, and he later directed a documentary,
Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards (2017), about his friend and fellow subversive Manolo Blahnik.
He wrote and illustrated books for children including The Jungle ABC (1998) and Snowman in Paradise (2004). He assisted his great friend Grace Coddington, the veteran creative director at American Vogue, with the writing of her memoir
Grace (2012), and published two children’s books about the adventures of Gingernutz, an orangutan in Borneo who dreams of making it big in the fashion world, inspired by the life of the flame-haired Grace.
Roberts’s collage art was collected in the volume The Snippy World of New Yorker Fashion Artist Michael Roberts (2005), and he also published two volumes of photographs of Sicily, where he had finally settled after a nomadic life.
In 2022 he was appointed CBE.