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Sketch fashion art5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() As a photographer, he was proud of a 1989 shot he took of his friend Vivienne Westwood done up as Margaret Thatcher, for the cover of Tatler. Then there was the documentary he directed about the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, and a music video he made for Bryan Ferry. Gusts from open windows were an occupational hazard so were hotel maids, who sometimes swept his bits of paper treasure into the trash. He serenely sheared out his shapes wherever he went, the way another person might knit after 9/11, when scissors were banned from flights, he was at a loss. (As Wolcott Gibbs put it, in a 1937 memo to editors, “The more ‘as a matter of facts,’ ‘howevers,’ ‘for instances,’ etc., you can cut out, the nearer you are to the Kingdom of Heaven.”) Michael’s scissors flashed with precision, the leftover scraps pooling at his feet like rainbow confetti. The careful snipping of his scissors was a parallel, tangible version of what we editors do all day. He had an austere bent he enjoyed the challenge of telling a complex story using only scraps of paper. The old fashion chestnut “Elegance is refusal” was a favorite of Michael’s. Michael Roberts was in the fashion world but not of it. The woman “is a slave to fashion, dressing slavishly in gold, which is the fashion moment, and the poor little buggers are slaving to fashion while working to enhance her beauty.” Another cover, called “Head Over Heels,” shows models in sky-high stilettos, accessorized with canes and bandages around their ankles. “It works on two levels,” Michael told Marshall Heyman, in an interview for. One cover, from 2001, titled “Slaves to Fashion,” shows itty-bitty laborers dragging huge slabs of gold onto a society woman’s outfit, as if building the pyramids. “Hideous!” (which he pronounced “HID-yuss!”) was a favorite exclamation, followed by “ Cauchemar!” In tone, his tart graphic takes on fashion foolishness recall Peter Arno’s sly eviscerations of café society. Nothing delighted him more than poking at its silliness and pomposity with the point of his scissors. Michael was in the fashion world but not of it. Born in England and educated at art school, he was a painter, an illustrator, a stylist, and a photographer, but New Yorker readers will remember him for his collages, joyous layers of colorful shapes that he cut freehand with scissors, usually working without a sketch. Tina Brown, who brought Michael to the magazine, called him the Jean Cocteau of the fashion world. Beginning in 1996, he contributed twenty-three exuberant covers, most of them for the magazine’s Style & Design issues, which he pioneered. Pay attention to bend lines (the curve of the rib cage, etc.) as those angles and lines are crucial to creating a figure that doesn't look like it has dislocated body parts.Michael Roberts, who died on Monday in Taormina, Sicily, was The New Yorker’s first and only fashion director. ![]() Draw the waist as a horizontal line that’s shorter than the shoulder and hips lines.
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