Michael Roberts’s Joyous Collage of a Life

Michael Roberts, who died on Monday in Taormina, Sicily, was The New Yorker’s first and only fashion director. Beginning in 1996, he contributed twenty-three exuberant covers, most of them for the magazine’s Style & Design issues, which he pioneered. Tina Brown, who brought Michael to the magazine, called him the Jean Cocteau of the fashion world. 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.

new yorker bags