Obituary Michael Roberts | Mode

Fashion journalist Michael Roberts’ preferred medium is Canson art paper, which he freehands cut into neatly cropped collages, or cut into tiny dots to rearrange into mosaics, for magazine covers or book illustrations. Her art, bit by bit bringing her together, reflects her life in fashion. He wrote about it, commissioned an unlikely other person to do it, photographed it for media and advertising, and lured the legendary hot-tempered lensman to shoot it. She can find clothes, pick crazy spots, stage photoshoot stories, and write witty critiques of the company. He’s also always the most elegant person involved, effortlessly cool.

Roberts, who died at the age of 75, was never concerned with resumes, as each new role or venture seemed to just evolve, but they moved on to serious careers. She was a writer for the Sunday Times in the 1970s, when the catwalk drama of new couture and rising celebrity designers demanded a fashion voice that was theater critic and gossip columnist. Then from 1979 she was art and style director of Tatler magazine, when its editor, Tina Brown, changed it from a country house title to the most glossy she and she both believe that fashion in print is a money-based transaction, here today and go tomorrow, where style is attitude, behavior, but permanent. They are copycats, out for mischief. Roberts can persuade even an institution like Eton college to cooperate in his own mockery, though his best gags, for covers, are dress, style, and photos complete with the glint of doubt in his eyes. Vivienne Westwood disguised as Margaret Thatcher in 1989, towards the end of his reign. An inspired caricature, he could also turn designer Rifat Ozbek into editor dragon empress Diana Vreeland, and transvestite into Dusty Springfield. The fake can turn into real through style.

In his light and funny voice, Roberts will tell you that the boring mechanics of fashion are no more interesting than car maintenance, and keep your eyes on the wider visual world. She might go to a garment town at fashion week and not attend any shows, as the visual future is more clearly visible on her streets, or appear at mall events in emerging markets, and write, candid but not mean, about hope. and his pretense. She never lost her openness to what she saw, or her subversive reaction to what was becoming the international mega fashion industrial complex.

Roberts attributed this mischievous approach to his lifelong outsider status. What he is both candid and humorous about his origins, admitting only (with variations) being born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, his mother is English, and his father, who died when he was a child, from St Lucia; being mixed-race made for a miserable childhood in a harsh boarding school. His way out was Wycombe High School of the Arts, where he transitioned from fine art to graphics to fashion. He won an advertising agency illustration competition, the prize of which was a trip to New York. There she met Andy Warhol and photographer Richard Avedon, and her pictures were published in Women’s Wear Daily.

Back in London, he was noticed by Janey Ironside, a professor of fashion at the Royal College of Art, while in 1969 Molly Parkin, rapscallion fashion editor of the Sunday Times, hired him as an assistant. He filled in so new when a regular writer fell ill that he was awarded a weekly entry and expanded from there. The naughty and unclassifiable Roberts brainchild sent war photographer Don McCullin to photograph the Parisian collection squarely for a fractured, half haute couture, half punk fashion era. Sunday Times editor Harold Evans introduced him to Brown, and Roberts was relieved to leave his snappy commentary slot, a jolt to read but dismal to write, for Tatler, when he went there. Five years later he brought it to US audiences as Vanity Fair’s fashion director after he was appointed editor: their VF collaboration lacked Tatler satire but earned American acclaim and pizzazz.

Roberts was at home everywhere, working for most of the national editions of Vogue, and other magazines, besides VF. In addition to his unstoppable flow of ideas, he knows how to do things, is usually self-taught (though he has learned in college how to ease head from sleeve to shoulder), and often has to do so to achieve the standard he requires. That’s why he took up photography, first for fashion and advertising, then for portraits and people, taking advice straight from his hero Irving Penn: There’s always enough light and you don’t need more than two rolls of film. Roberts also began directing films, with music videos winning MTV awards Limbo (1987) for Bryan Ferry, graphic as a tribute to cabaret artist Josephine Baker.

Brown moved to the New Yorker in 1997, and commissioned Roberts to direct his regular fashion editions: rarely getting down to camera work, he cut the paper for 22 covers plus illustrated features before returning to Vanity Fair in 2006 for a final round of fashion photography. As a seer of the future, she saw that even as magazines were getting fatter before the 2008 crash, mass fads, selfies, and internet image transmission would soon be her downfall.

Roberts left before the glossies dwindled. His first paper collage picture book, ABC Forestnominally for children, was published in 1998, and he drew, wrote, contributed to and directed the art of others over the next 20 years, including the memoirs of Vogue creative director Grace Coddington and two children’s books about the adventures of the orangutan, GingerNutzthat she was based on the red-haired Grace.

He directed a documentary, Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards (2017), about his old friend and fellow troublemaker Manolo Blahnik, and published two volumes of Sicilian photographs. In 2022 it was appointed CBE.

After living lightly with little baggage in London, Paris, New York, and Rio de Janeiro, he eventually settled in Sicily, which he loved as where classical Rome, Italy, the Middle East, and north Africa all left their mark, especially the mosaics.