Michael Roberts, the author, editor, stylist, and photographer finest identified for his influential tenures as the style and elegance director of Self-importance Honest journal and the style editor of the New Yorker, died on Monday morning on the age of 75, a detailed good friend has confirmed. “It’s with one very heavy coronary heart that now we have to announce the loss of life of our beloved good friend Michael,” they wrote. “He died peacefully, early on Monday morning, at his dwelling on the island of Sicily.”
All through his wide-ranging five-decade profession, Roberts formed the course of style by phrases, photos, and illustrations, along with his physique of labor serving as a unprecedented doc of the business’s ever-changing panorama. Identified for his shut working relationship with the Self-importance Honest editor Tina Brown—who went on to introduce Roberts to readers of the New Yorker in 1997 as “the Jean Cocteau of the style world”—Roberts’s maverick skills noticed him rise to turn into one of many business’s most revered authorities, whilst he moved away from styling and writing to discover different artistic avenues in his later profession. In 2022, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for providers to style as a part of the Queen’s New 12 months Honors.
Illustration by Michael Roberts, Self-importance Honest, April 2009
Born in Buckinghamshire in 1948 to a father from St. Lucia and an English mom, Roberts’s unconventional schooling started when he was despatched off to boarding faculty after his father died in 1960. He then moved on to review superb artwork and graphic design at an artwork faculty in Excessive Wycombe, earlier than finally transferring to the style division. Whereas nonetheless at school, he received an illustration prize sponsored by an promoting company that allowed him to journey to New York, the place he met Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon, and had his work revealed for the primary time in Girls’s Put on Day by day.
Quickly after graduating, Roberts went on to help the celebrated style editor Molly Parkin on the progressive style title Nova earlier than transferring along with her to London’s Sunday Occasions in 1969. There, he shortly gained consideration for his frank and viciously humorous column on the style business, approaching the rarefied world of favor by a subversive New Journalism lens. (“Saint Laurent calls his slim look the tube; Karl Lagerfeld calls his the tunnel; I can see no gentle on the finish of it,” he as soon as wrote.)
After assembly Tina Brown by her husband, the long-serving Sunday Occasions editor Harold Evans, Roberts was invited to hitch her as model and artwork director when she took over Tatler journal in 1979. The pair made waves with their daring style tales, remodeling the excessive society bible into one thing altogether edgier. In one in all Roberts’s most well-known covers, for the April 1989 subject, he photographed and styled Vivienne Westwood—the godmother of punk herself—to seem as Margaret Thatcher. Roberts additionally usually collaborated with cutting-edge style skills, together with Judy Blame and Isabella Blow, inside its pages.
In 1984, when Brown decamped to New York to edit Self-importance Honest, Roberts adopted, and so they continued their pioneering work with a splashy debut cowl that includes a Helmut Newton picture of Daryl Hannah blindfolded and clutching two Oscars, earlier than occurring to run every little thing from lavish style specials impressed by the L.A. Olympic Video games to Brideshead Revisited, in addition to covers with Raquel Welch and Joan Collins. It was round this time that Roberts additionally started venturing additional into pictures and filmmaking, notably directing the music video for Bryan Ferry’s 1988 single “Limbo,” profitable himself an MTV Award for finest breakthrough video.
