David Kuhn, a longtime friend and literary agent for several of Mr. Roberts’s books, confirmed the death. The cause was not immediately available.
Born in Britain to an English mother and a father from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, Mr. Roberts was one of the few men of color in the fashion industry of his era. The London Guardian once declared him “one of the style gurus of modern times” and “fashion’s most celebrated Renaissance man.”
He embarked on his fashion-writing career in the late 1960s at the Sunday Times of London, where he quickly became known for his biting humor.
Of a collection by designer Adrian Cartmell that had been billed as “throwaway chic,” Mr. Roberts observed that “some of it is indeed chic,” but “much should be thrown away.” Opining on other collections, he proffered the judgment that “Saint Laurent calls his narrow look the Tube; Karl Lagerfeld calls his the Tunnel; I can see no light at the end of it.”
Mr. Roberts maintained his Swiftian sensibility throughout his career. But he said he grew weary of his own incessant jabs, however deserved they might be, and however irresistible they proved to readers. He went on to build a wide-ranging creative career that took him to the fashion capitals of the world.
Mr. Roberts was a “bohemian creative person of a different time,” magazine editor Tina Brown said in an interview, “so original and alive … to everything about the culture.”
Brown, who met Mr. Roberts when he was writing for the Sunday Times, hired him as style and art director — her “employee No. 1,” she said — when she became editor in chief of the British magazine the Tatler. On one memorable cover of the high-society glossy, he wryly dressed Vivienne Westwood, the designer who popularized the punk look in British fashion, as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
“There’s a great tradition of irony and satire which is never bettered than when done in England,” Mr. Roberts told the Guardian. “I saw no harm in doing that at Tatler, and it was well received by the readers. The only people who didn’t receive it well were the arrivistes, the wannabe aristos, the obsessed, social-climbing middle and upper middle classes who come through as rather tragic.”
Mr. Roberts followed Brown to Vanity Fair and later the New Yorker when she became executive editor of both publications. At the New Yorker, he was the only person ever to receive the portfolio of fashion director.
Starting in 1996, according to the magazine, Mr. Roberts created 23 New Yorker covers — mainly for Style & Design issues — in his trademark collage style. Like his writings, the cover art skewered the fashion industry for what he saw as its vanity. In a cover from 1997, titled “Head Over Heels,” he assembled bits of hand-cut paper to depict models sporting vertiginously high stiletto heels — as well as canes, lest they fall, and bandage wraps for their ankles.
Mr. Roberts, who also had associations over the years with magazines including Condé Nast Traveller and the many international editions of Vogue, later returned to Vanity Fair as fashion and style director. He published a controversial cover photo in 2008 showing Miley Cyrus, the then-15-year-old singer and “Hannah Montana” actress, with a bare back. The portrait, taken by photographer Annie Leibovitz, ignited an outcry over what critics denounced as a suggestive depiction of the underage star.
“I’m European. I come from London, I lived in Paris, and I just find it extraordinary that this has been blown up like this,” Mr. Roberts told Women’s Wear Daily at the time.
“The whole kiddie porn prurient angle seems to be worryingly sour grapes from other magazines that didn’t get a picture like this,” he continued. “Teenagers can be seen on TV and in the cinema in the most prurient ways, and then a photograph, which is for all intents and purposes innocent, is blown out of portion and condemned as some ridiculous apotheosis. It’s a joke to me. But it’s not a joke because I don’t find it funny. I find it offensive.”
Beyond magazine publishing, Mr. Roberts assisted Grace Coddington, the longtime creative director at American Vogue, with the writing of her memoir “Grace” (2012). He wrote, directed and co-produced “Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards” (2017) about his longtime friend, the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik.
Mr. Roberts’s collage art was collected in the volume “The Snippy World of New Yorker Fashion Artist Michael Roberts” (2005). He wrote and illustrated books for children including “The Jungle ABC” (1998) and “Snowman in Paradise” (2004). For adults, he penned the alphabet book “Fashion Victims: The Catty Catalogue of Stylish Casualties, From A to Z” (2008), judged by a New York Times reviewer to be an “instant artifact.” The introduction perhaps encapsulated his career:
But here, dear readers, we intend
To contemplate the world of trend.
Dissect the egos, greed, and lies
That dazzle fashion’s butterflies.
And then in language full of sass
Strip bare the vain, the mean, the crass.
Mr. Roberts — his full name could not immediately be confirmed — was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, in southeast-central England, on Oct. 2, 1947. His father, an engineer, died in 1960, the London Daily Telegraph reported. His mother, a secretary, sent him to a series of boarding schools where Mr. Roberts recalled being deeply unhappy.
“I was sent away to a very, very difficult place where, if you didn’t survive, you went under,” he cryptically told the Guardian, in one of his few public comments about his early life. “The day I arrived, a boy hung himself. Interestingly enough, I started out loathing it and ended up loving it. You owed nothing to anyone. You only survived through your own wits but if you survived, you knew you had made it.”
Mr. Roberts later enrolled at an art school in the English town of High Wycombe, studying fine art, graphic design and fashion. He won a fashion illustration contest whose prize was a trip to New York, where he met figures including artist Andy Warhol and photographer Richard Avedon.
Mr. Roberts moved frequently throughout his life, once telling the New York Times that “there is nowhere I can safely say I’d lay my hat and call it home.” In recent years, he lived in Sicily, whose people and landscape he documented in two books of photography, “Shot in Sicily” and “Island of Eternal Beauties.”
A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Before her death last year, Queen Elizabeth II named Mr. Roberts a commander of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to fashion. In the book “Fashion Victims” he described his professional milieu in couplets:
The Fashion World, it’s often said,
Has wasted space inside its head.
And when it comes to introspection
Prefers a mirror for reflection.
