Christopher Gibbs

Christopher Henry Gibbs (born 29 July 1938) is a British antiques dealer and collector who was also an influential figure in men's fashion and interior design in 1960s London. He has been credited with inventing Swinging London, and has been called the "King of Chelsea" and "London's most famous antiques dealer". The New York Times described him as a "man of infinite taste, judgment and experience, the one who introduced a whole generation to the distressed bohemian style of interior design."

Gibbs is the fifth son of Hon. Sir Geoffrey Cokayne Gibbs KCMG and his wife Helen Margaret Leslie CBE, and the grandson of Herbert Gibbs, 1st Baron Hunsdon of Hunsdon. His elder brother is the financier Sir Roger Gibbs. He was educated at Eton College, from which he was expelled "for being generally totally impossible",Stanbridge Earls School and the University of Poitiers.

A style leader in 1960s London, Gibbs is credited with fellow Old Etonian Robert Fraser with inventing "Swinging London". He has been said to be the first man to wear flared trousers in 1961, and was ordering flower print shirts by 1964. He was an editor of the shopping guide in the quarterly Men in Vogue, the first male edition of the magazine produced between 1965 and 1970, which was closely associated with the "Peacock revolution" in English men's fashion in the 1960s. His style has been described as a kind of "louche dandyism", while others have described him as a latter-day Beau Brummell.

At the same time, Gibbs was running his own antiques business, which he had started in 1958, making regular trips to Morocco to acquire stock. He brought back Moroccan brass lamps, carpets, soft furnishings and other things that came to characterise the "hippie look".

Gibbs was a friend of the Rolling Stones and his upper-class background was of interest to Mick Jagger, whose origins were more modest. It was at one of Gibbs' Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, dinner parties that Jagger whispered to the fashion designer Michael Fish, "I'm here to learn how to be a gentleman". In 1967, Gibbs was at Keith Richards's country house, Redlands, in West Wittering, when Richards, Jagger and Marianne Faithfull were all arrested (and Jagger subsequently imprisoned) for possession of illegal drugs. And in 1968, Gibbs introduced Prince Rupert Loewenstein, then working in London as a merchant banker, to Jagger. Loewenstein went on to become the Stones' business manager until 2007.

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