Robin Stubbs, who has died aged 84 after suffering from dementia, was a costume designer who gave David Jason, as Del Boy, a new yuppy look in the TV sitcom Only Fools and Horses. In the era of Margaret Thatcher and get-rich-quick schemes, Stubbs moved Del’s look away from his market-trader gear of sheepskin coat and flat cap, and dressed him instead in upmarket suits bought for hundreds of pounds at Austin Reed in Regent Street, London.
“We always had to be discreet when we went for them because, if David is recognised, he gets mobbed,” Stubbs told Steve Clark, author of The Only Fools and Horses Story.
The costume designer joined the programme in 1986, five years after John Sullivan’s creation hit TV screens with its saga of the fly-pitcher Derek “Del Boy” Trotter and his “plonker” younger brother, Rodney (played by Nicholas Lyndhurst), wheeling and dealing around Peckham, south London.
In 1989, the yuppy image was introduced when Sullivan wanted to reflect a new world already portrayed on screen by Michael Douglas’s ruthless financier Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street and Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney character on TV.
Stubbs completed the “remodel” of Jason’s cheap, old wardrobe with a banknote-green mackintosh from Dickins & Jones and shopped at both Austin Reed and Marks & Spencer for new shirts, and Tie Rack for shiny ties.
Jason’s jewellery looked as if more had been spent on it, but most was in reality as cheap as ever. “It was the sort of stuff Del Boy would sell himself,” Stubbs said. One item bucking the trend was a necklace with a “D” initial that the costume designer had specially made – costing £70, more than all the rest put together. New accessories included a mobile phone, a Filofax and an aluminium briefcase.
Stubbs was also responsible for the Batman and Robin suits worn by Jason and Lyndhurst at a fancy-dress party in the first of three 1996 Christmas specials, when he finished his decade on the show.
Before his work on Only Fools and Horses, he had the more sombre task of creating costumes for the first series of Tenko (1981), the drama about British, Dutch and Australian women held prisoner by the Japanese in the Dutch East Indies following the fall of Singapore in 1942.
The programme, filmed mostly in Dorset with an ensemble cast including Ann Bell, Stephanie Cole and Stephanie Beacham, was groundbreaking in its realistic portrayal of the miserable conditions experienced by the women. “Each actress had at least four identical outfits in various degrees of deterioration,” Stubbs told Andy Priestner, author of Remembering Tenko: A Celebration of the Classic TV Drama Series. He said they were all “well-made and reasonably tough”, adding: “To break them down, we used coloured hairspray and glycerine.”
By the end of the series, with its story stretching over a year, further “distressing” of costumes was needed, so they were made to look more ragged and bleached by the sun. Worn-out shoes were replaced by homemade sandals.
A small amount of filming in Singapore was marred for Stubbs when costumes shipped there from Britain – including smart pre-war dresses, silk underwear and period hats, as well as uniforms and boots for the men – were customs-stamped and thrown back in their hampers. “We opened them to find boots tipped on top of the women’s hats,” he recalled. “We then had the task of trying to eradicate the customs stamps off most of the clothes.”
Stubbs was born in Redditch, Worcestershire, to Winifred (nee Sowden), and her husband, James, an office clerk. On leaving Redditch county high school, he took an engineering apprenticeship before delivering vehicles for a haulage company. In 1966, he switched career, joining the BBC as a dresser.
A year later, he was responsible for props on the Beatles’ TV film musical special Magical Mystery Tour. “I got on very well with John Lennon, even though he was off his head on pot or whatever most of the time,” Stubbs said in 2008.
By 1974, he was a costume assistant on Fall of Eagles, a 13-part BBC historical drama tracing the collapse of three great European dynasties caused by the first world war. As costume designer, he then worked on the 1976 Porridge Christmas special, episodes of Ripping Yarns (1977), seven Play for Today productions, including The Spongers (1978) by Jim Allen, two Dennis Potter creations, Visitors (1987) and Blackeyes (1989), and the Barry Hines play Born Kicking (1992). He also worked on half a dozen other sitcoms, including the 1984 series of Don’t Wait Up and Waiting for God (1993-94).
For a different Play for Today, Just Another Saturday (1975), Peter McDougall’s story about an Orange order march in Glasgow, Stubbs dressed Billy Connolly. “I remember taking him out shopping and he couldn’t understand why I’d bought him a set of clothes exactly the same as the ones he was already wearing,” he said. “I then had to break it to him that his character was going to get slashed with a knife later that day, so we needed some spare gear.”
In 1995, Stubbs joined his wife, Jacqui (nee Skinner), a costume-maker whom he married in 1963, in her garden design company.
Five years later, the couple travelled to Australia and New Zealand, where they settled in Queenstown, South Island, in 2002.
Jacqui died in 2023. Stubbs is survived by his sisters, Wendy and Christine, and brother, Simon.
• Robin Stubbs, costume designer, born 5 February 1940; died 20 September 2024
