Almost 50 years ago, I was fashion editor of the Sunday Times and a man in his mid-twenties by the name of Michael Roberts was a junior editor. Born in Buckinghamshire in 1947 to an English mother and a father from St Lucia, he was handsome and stood very tall and straight. Even so, when he was named the world’s most elegantly dressed man under 30 at the International Male Elegance Awards, I was baffled. His habitual garment was a second-hand tweed coat done up with a piece of string… how could this be?
But it wasn’t long before his creative genius became obvious – to me and to the rest of the world. Michael, who died this week in Sicily at the age of 75, went on to help shape the course of fashion over the past five decades, becoming what Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful called a ‘guiding light’.
At the office Michael was idle about returning the clothes he had borrowed to photograph for his column and, as a result, sometimes got into trouble
I’ll remember him best, though, for one of the most humiliating – and comic – encounters of my life. It was the summer of 1975, and with my husband using my car I was left driving my brother-in-law’s three-wheeler Reliant (abandoned when he joined a religious order in Spain). The car had a huge sticker on the back window saying ‘ABORTION KILLS’. To avoid being seen anywhere near it I used to park as far from the Sunday Times office as I could. I was eight months pregnant and vast in size, and one morning, as I struggled like a beetle on its back to get out of the driver’s seat (which seemed to be below pavement level), Michael sauntered up elegantly. He watched my contortions for a minute and then said: ‘Mmmmm. Glam.’ I had a soft spot for him from that moment onwards.
At the office Michael was idle about returning the clothes he had borrowed to photograph for his column and, as a result, sometimes got into trouble. I defended him to Harry Evans, our editor, because Michael was so remarkably good at his job.
When I left the paper to have my baby, I wasn’t surprised to see Michael take over as fashion editor. He proved to be not just a witty writer and brilliant artist/illustrator (he had originally been hired by Molly Parkin, my predecessor, straight from art school – they used to joke that it was only because they both smoked Consulate cigarettes) but an excellent photographer and shrewd commentator as well.
Michael went on from the Sunday Times to be, in turn, design/style/art/fashion director – or all three at once – for British Vogue, Tatler and Vanity Fair in Paris and New York. But perhaps the summit of his career was his job as fashion director of the New Yorker – a role that was created especially for him.
His lifelong friendship with influential Vogue editor Grace Coddington led to a handful of books – some serious ones on her and her years at the magazine, some on a cartoon character called GingerNutz, a monkey who becomes a model (Coddington was a model before she became an editor). He made a well-received documentary film – Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards – about another old friend, the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, and along with Damien Hirst and Frank Gehry he helped decorate Sexy Fish restaurant in London. As one Guardian commentator put it, he was ‘fashion’s most celebrated Renaissance man’. Deservedly he was awarded the CBE for services to fashion in the 2022 New Year’s honours list.
Last year Michael released what was to be his final book, Island of Eternal Beauties: A Road Trip Around Sicily, written by him and illustrated with his own photographs and some of the charming paper mosaic pictures he had started making. He had discovered the island in 1987 through Blahnik (who is Sicilian) and visited often, choosing it as a location for his fashion shoots – until four years ago when he decided to make it his home.
This is what he wrote about Taomina where he had bought an apartment: ‘Between April and May when frothy waves of mauve wisteria flood over its city walls Taomina might lay claim to be the most charming and romantic spot on Earth. Climb the few steps to its ancient Greek amphitheatre that looks out over the Ionian Sea and the word “might” becomes redundant.’ A suitably remarkable place, then, for this remarkable man to have spent his final days.
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