Throughout his wide-ranging five-decade career, Roberts shaped the course of fashion through words, images, and illustrations, with his body of work serving as an extraordinary document of the industry’s ever-changing landscape. Known for his close working relationship with the Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown—who went on to introduce Roberts to readers of the New Yorker in 1997 as “the Jean Cocteau of the fashion world”—Roberts’s maverick talents saw him rise to become one of the industry’s most respected authorities, even as he moved away from styling and writing to explore other creative avenues in his later career. In 2022, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to fashion as part of the Queen’s New Year Honors.
Born in Buckinghamshire in 1948 to a father from St. Lucia and an English mother, Roberts’s unconventional education began when he was sent off to boarding school after his father died in 1960. He then moved on to study fine art and graphic design at an art school in High Wycombe, before eventually transferring to the fashion department. While still at college, he won an illustration prize sponsored by an advertising agency that allowed him to travel to New York, where he met Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon, and had his work published for the first time in Women’s Wear Daily.
Soon after graduating, Roberts went on to assist the celebrated fashion editor Molly Parkin at the progressive fashion title Nova before moving with her to London’s Sunday Times in 1969. There, he quickly gained attention for his frank and viciously funny column on the fashion industry, approaching the rarefied world of style through a subversive New Journalism lens. (“Saint Laurent calls his narrow look the tube; Karl Lagerfeld calls his the tunnel; I can see no light at the end of it,” he once wrote.)
After meeting Tina Brown through her husband, the long-serving Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, Roberts was invited to join her as style and art director when she took over Tatler magazine in 1979. The pair made waves with their bold fashion stories, transforming the high society bible into something altogether edgier. In one of Roberts’s most famous covers, for the April 1989 issue, he photographed and styled Vivienne Westwood—the godmother of punk herself—to appear as Margaret Thatcher. Roberts also regularly collaborated with cutting-edge fashion talents, including Judy Blame and Isabella Blow, within its pages.
In 1984, when Brown decamped to New York to edit Vanity Fair, Roberts followed, and they continued their pioneering work with a splashy debut cover featuring a Helmut Newton image of Daryl Hannah blindfolded and clutching two Oscars, before going on to run everything from lavish fashion specials inspired by the L.A. Olympic Games to Brideshead Revisited, as well as covers with Raquel Welch and Joan Collins. It was around this time that Roberts also began venturing further into photography and filmmaking, notably directing the music video for Bryan Ferry’s 1988 single “Limbo,” winning himself an MTV Award for best breakthrough video.
While Roberts continued to photograph, write, and style for a wide range of magazines throughout his long career—including contributions to a seemingly endless number of international editions of Vogue—his great passion throughout the 1990s and 2000s was his illustration books. His debut, The Jungle ABC, was published in 1998 with a foreword by Iman: featuring graphic, colorful cutout collages, it presented the alphabet as brought to life by the flora and fauna of Africa, with Roberts stating that it was intended for both children and adults. His fifth book, Fashion Victims: The Catty Catalogue of Stylish Casualties, From A to Z, was published in 2011 as a delightfully pithy, tongue-in-cheek ribbing of the industry he knew so well.
More recently, Roberts’s projects included writing the introduction for his close friend and collaborator Grace Coddington’s 2016 book with Phaidon, Grace, and directing the 2017 documentary Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards, about the life story and creative journey of the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. As a follow-up to his 2007 book Shot in Sicily—a photographic document of the Italian island which he first visited in 1987, and where he settled permanently in 2019—he released his final book Island of Eternal Beauties last year as a love letter to a place that became his home. In keeping with his restless spirit, it even featured an entirely new creative venture for Roberts: mosaics.
Roberts’s versatile talents and playful sense of humor have been remembered by his friends and collaborators following his passing. “Michael Roberts really made me see what was possible: he and André Leon Talley were two Black people at the top of the industry,” said Edward Enninful, editor-in-chief of British Vogue. “I would see his stories in Tatler and think, wow, there’s a Black man who is doing it on his own terms. Michael was always very generous, kind, encouraging, and funny. And above all, so talented.”
“Michael’s legacy is beauty,” writes the former Vogue editor William Norwich. “Towering beauty. Yes, hipness, elegance, wit and humor, and beauty. For some it will be his art and illustration that they love and remember best, others his photography, the fashion work for Italian Vogue and the covers of the Tatler, for others, his razor-sharp writing and editing. For others, those closest to him, his loyal and essential friendship. There was a magical convergence of talent in London in the 1980s—Anna Wintour, Tina Brown, Grace Coddington, Gabé Doppelt, Sarah Giles, Manolo Blahnik, and more. In this Camelot, Michael was a king. Eccentric, and a dreamer. Ever surprising. Not from privilege, his creativity and sense of beauty and humor was his destiny. He is a power of example to generations younger and still to come that a life in art, and in style and fashion, isn’t about the parties, it’s about the work.”
Original story from Vogue.
