Christopher Gibbs, Avatar of ‘Swinging London,’ Dies at 80

Christopher Gibbs, an erudite London antiques dealer and dandy who introduced the raffish “distressed bohemian” style to interior design and helped start the Peacock Revolution in menswear, died early Sunday at his home in Tangier, Morocco. Only minutes earlier, at midnight, he had turned 80.

Cosimo Sesti, an architect and Gibbs’ godson, said in a telephone interview from Tangier the cause was respiratory and cardiac failure.

Said to be a descendant of Margaret Pole, the executed 16th-century Plantagenet heiress to the English throne, Gibbs was an aristocratic lodestone for rock stars like Mick Jagger (“I’m here to learn how to be a gentleman,” Jagger was quoted as saying after visiting Gibbs at his home), John Paul Getty Jr. (whom Gibbs persuaded to donate $40 million to the National Gallery in London), the Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs; and Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein of Bavaria, a banker who became the Rolling Stones’ business manager. They were all clients of his or guests at his salons.

Gibbs had a reliable formula for surviving as a society style-maker in the 1960s. As he confided to Paul Gorman in his book “The Look: Adventures in Pop & Rock Fashion” (2001), “you had to be monumentally narcissistic and have time on your hands, and just about enough money to do it.”

But Gibbs had more going for him than that. Unlike many of his decadent mates, Gibbs was wise, worldly and endowed with both a work ethic and a refined if finicky taste that was undiminished by his extensive experimentation with drugs or his predilection for exotica, like a stuffed, two-headed lamb and a collection of whips.

“He is also a leading proponent of that elusive brand of anti-decoration, high-bohemian taste favored by self-confident Englishmen, a look based on well-worn grandeur, disarming charm and unexpected contrasts,” Christopher Mason wrote in The New York Times in 2000.

“The magic,” he added, “is in the mix of masterpieces and oddities — like an assemblage of refined and wild-card house guests who mysteriously combine to create the ideal convivial country-house weekend. The allergy here is to the banal, not to dust.”

As Gibbs himself put it: "I like things in their natural state — people especially. As life goes by, that’s what I admire: objects and people that are unmonkeyed with, that are themselves, not trying to be something else.”

In 1960s Swinging London, the people who aspired to the hedonistic set were habitually trying to be like him.

As a clothes horse himself and also while editing the shopping guide of the quarterly Men in Vogue magazine from 1965 to 1970, Gibbs was credited with popularizing flared trousers, caftans and print shirts.

His eclectic taste in objects leaned toward elegant mahogany and marbled tables, shabby sofas, faded damasks and a sock cabinet that was designed by Sir William Chambers and belonged to the first Earl of Iveagh (smelly socks included). Taste, he once suggested, could not be taught.

“It’s something you catch,” he said, “like measles or religion.”

His objects of desire filled his Cheyne Walk home in London, which was borrowed by Michelangelo Antonioni for the party scene in his movie “Blow-Up” (1966) and by Kenneth Anger to shoot the occult film “Lucifer Rising” (1972).

Gibbs also designed what he called the “earthly paradise” inhabited by the has-been rock star played by Mick Jagger in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s film “Performance” (1970).

“Christopher was almost single-handedly responsible for making English antiques, and English heritage, look ‘cool’ again,” James Geginato, writer-at-large for Vanity Fair, said in an email.

Gibbs’ London manor, which once belonged to painter James McNeill Whistler, was also the scene of a party for poet Allen Ginsberg, where the hors d’oeuvres included a batch of industrial-strength hashish brownies. According a biography of Jagger by Christopher Andersen, the socially active Princess Margaret was among the guests who were hospitalized that night with what was diagnosed as food poisoning.

Christopher Henry Gibbs was born on July 29, 1938, in Hatfield, about 20 miles north of London, to Sir Geoffrey Cokayne Gibbs and Helen Margaret (Leslie) Gibbs.

Even as a 14-year-old Etonian, he affected velvet slippers, a monocle and a silver-topped cane with blue tassels. A year later, he was expelled, as he later explained unapologetically, for “illicit drinking, panty raids of other boys’ rooms — that sort of thing.”

After studying, according to various biographies, at the Sorbonne and the University of Poitiers in France and lasting three months in the British army (he had polio as a child and was soon found to be medically unfit), his mother in 1958 staked him to a goodly sum (about $225,000 in today’s dollars) when he was 20 to open an antiques dealership in Chelsea.

That same year he began making buying trips to Morocco to scope out brass lamps, carpets and other merchandise for his store and his clients.

Gibbs played hard, but worked hard, too.

“The only thing I’ll say in my favor,” he recalled, “is that I was practically the only person I knew who actually went to work at nine o’clock in the morning, whether I’d been up to eight o’clock or not, because I had a job, my own business, and I realized that, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have any of those things.” In 1972 he bought Davington Privy, a 12th-century former convent in Kent. After his mother died in 1980, he also took over his childhood home, the 19th-century manor house at Clifton Hampden in Oxfordshire. He sold it in 2000 after his 90-year-old housekeeper, Louise Wagland, the only other occupant, died.

He moved full time to Tangier in 2006. There he served as warden at the Anglican Church and tended his orchard of pomegranate trees and poisonous plants on a slope overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar.

He admitted to sometimes getting “homesick for snowdrops,” but to Milly de Cabrol, a New York interior designer who visited him in 2000, he had acquired the look of the very things he liked — of someone in his “natural state” — as he surveyed the breathtaking vista in his flowing caftan.

“He looked like Moses walking in the olive garden,” she said, “very peaceful, and looking forward to spending more time there.”