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.
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