Willie Landels, who has died aged 94, had been at the London office of the supreme ad agency J Walter Thompson for years, art directing smooth, cool come-ons for consumables, such as Lux soap and Campari, before he was invited into the editorial side of magazines. Later he become the editor of Harpers & Queen, from its launch in 1970 until 1985.
The invitation came from Jocelyn Stevens, who in 1957 had spent an inherited small fortune buying the Queen, a publication with a dwindling dowager readership interested mostly in each other’s dowdy doings. Stevens abbreviated the name to Queen, targeted it at the Chelsea set – young, entitled but not always titled, and, if not monied, capable of making or marrying money – and brought in Mark Boxer as art director and Beatrix Miller as editor. They restyled it as a glossy in which the editorial content looked and read as sharply as the best ads, which it began to attract, along with creative talent.
When Boxer departed to set up the Sunday Times colour magazine in 1962, Landels suceeded him, while Stevens took over from Miller in 1964. Landels had a philosophy about glossies: he believed the business of mags was glamour, visually projecting a desirable if unrealisable life.
He put firm layout restrictions on words, since he hated “turn to page XX” directing readers to excess text squeezed between dull, cheap ads at the back of the book. Words, he thought, should serve clever ideas appealing to the ideal audience, although he did reserve pages for Jennifer’s Diary, an ur-social-media space of snapped smiles at polo tournaments and name-dropping.
Queen was a success when he arrived, at the height of hems and the Swinging London fantasy, and Landels stayed imperturbable through the subsequent contest for readers with its rival, the American-born sophisticate upstart Harper’s Bazaar, and through Stevens’ heavy management style and loss of interest in Queen after his related investment project, the pirate pop station Radio Caroline, was outlawed in 1967. Stevens then sold Queen the following year to a passing businessman, whose fortunes foundered even as the mag conquered.
After sell-offs and take-overs, the rivals were bound together in 1970 as Harper’s & Queen, with Landels as editor, and his protege Ann Barr as features editor. H&Q dominated magazine racks until Tina Brown’s Tatler breezed in at the end of the decade. Landels recruited on merit and instinct, unworried by eccentricity or lack of direct experience, and his finds did him credit.
He spotted fresh photographers and gave them minimally briefed, free-rein commissions, while Barr’s editorial strategy was to use newcomers, such as Peter York and Craig Brown, and collective social reporting, assembling anecdotes into narratives like an upmarket Mass Observation, to substitute for the big-name writers H&Q could not afford. H&Q created a genre out of the taxonomy of the shifting British class system, or at least its upper levels, as with the Sloane Rangers. Circulation more than doubled, to around 100,000, and issues bulked up with top-end ads. Landels was unsure about such expansion, asking: “But who are all these ghastly new readers?”
Landels took the shape and feel of his magazine with quiet seriousness but was no careerist; he kept up his own private taste and non-media gifts for art and craft. He really was an outsider, born in Venice, the son of a Scot, Reynold Landels, a banker, and an Italian, Carla Manfredi, and educated at home near Lake Como, then briefly, from 16, a student at an art college in Brera, Milan.
Such stories from his youth as he shared could stun: he told his friend Charles Darwent that he met the dictator Mussolini and his mistress the day before they were shot near Milan in April 1945: “Mussolini looked terrified. Clara Petacci looked rather chic.” (Chic was a key Landels approval word.)
In art, he learned on the job, with an apprenticeship in 1947 as a scenographer at La Scala opera house in Milan: this gave him the practical nerve to cover space – huge, painted backdrops – and an understanding of how glamour is practised and projected. He also worked for the architect Gio Ponti, and had an exhibition of surrealist collages before leaving for London in 1950.
Landels still remained Italian in many ways, never losing his accent or his pleasure in cooking Italy’s most difficult simple dishes. Even when working as an editor, he continued to paint and make practically, especially furniture – in the 60s a sofa experiment with novel solid foam upholstery, in the 80s, handmade wooden desks for the H&Q office to replace deplorable plastic ones. Landels biked to work decades before it was fashionable and designed and chose his clothes with a Milanese ease with textiles.
His mischievousness, and refusal to defer to suits and stuffed shirts (he was a velvet slipper and tartan trews man), ended his H&Q reign. He had a wicked collage idea, photographs of real Bond Street bling applied to picture postcards of the royals. Nicholas Coleridge, who was to succeed him as editor, recalled that “all hell broke loose” upon publication, with royal-warranted jewellers claiming Harpers & Queen had offended her majesty.
Landels resigned eventually, from a phone box at Heathrow on his way to a summer holiday in Italy. There was one more editorship, in 1989-90, of a travel magazine, Departures, for American Express, but his definition of global glamour was wider, kinder and less obvious than his employers’ and he was soon out.
He painted and exhibited for the rest of his life, and designed for friends’ ventures, including books, and the club belonging to Robin Birley whose father Mark he had known in his ad-man days.
A first marriage in 1958, to Angela Ogden, ended in 1986; their two daughters, Lavinia and Francesca, and his second wife, Josephine Grever, whom he married in 2003, survive him.
• Willie Landels, artist and magazine editor, born 14 June 1928; died 29 April 2023
