Fashion journalist and illustrator who helped transform Tatler magazine into a leading glossy
The preferred medium of the fashion journalist Michael Roberts was Canson art paper, which he scissored freehand into crisp-cut collages, or snipped into minute dots to reassemble into mosaics, for magazine covers or book illustrations. His art, bit by bit putting it together, reflected his life in fashion. He wrote about it, commissioned unexpected others to do so, photographed for media and ads, and charmed cranky legendary lensmen into snapping for him. He could source the clothes, choose the crazy locale, stage the shoot’s story, and write a witty critique of the enterprise. He was also always the most elegant person involved, effortlessly cool.
Roberts, who has died aged 75, never bothered with a résumé, since every new role or venture seemed to just develop, but they totted up to a serious career. He was a writer on the Sunday Times in the 1970s, when new couture catwalk drama and heightened designer celebrity demanded a fashion voice that was both theatre critic and gossip columnist. Then from 1979 he was art and style director of Tatler magazine, when the editor, Tina Brown, transformed it from a country house title into the shiniest glossy – he and she both believed that fashion in print was a money-based transaction, here today and gone tomorrow, where style was an attitude, a behaviour, yet permanent. They were mickey-takers, out for mischief. Roberts could persuade even an institution like Eton college to cooperate in its own mockery, though his best joke, for a cover, was to dress, style and photograph – complete to a flash of doubt in her eyes – Vivienne Westwood impersonating Margaret Thatcher in 1989, towards the end of her reign. An inspired caricaturist, he could similarly make over the designer Rifat Ozbek into the dragon empress editor Diana Vreeland, and a drag queen into Dusty Springfield. The fake could transmute to the real through style.
