by ‘I am very worried about Catherine [Middleton], is she ok? It’s a little scary. The whole royal thing could rock. You don’t realize how important it is until you live in America,’ says 87-year-old Barbara Hulanicki, who wants updates on all things UK before she leaves her home in Miami to return to London this weekend. ‘I have always loved the Evening Standard. It was so amazing. So quick, in and out,’ she says, coming up in the air between very sly grunts.
The fashion empress started her famous career with the Evening Standard in 1955, I won the swimsuit design competition at the age of 19. ‘I received a phone call and they said, we want to inform you that you have won the competition. I almost died. If you’ve ever won anything, you’re in for a shock like that. You go and eat a big cake.’ Almost 70 years later and it is her career that has brought her back here at ES magazinethis time on the eve of a major retrospective exhibition celebrating Hulanicki’s greatest achievement: Biba.
Described by the press as ‘the most beautiful shop in the world’, Biba was much more than a fashion brand. It was a sublime hurricane that lasted just over ten years, but changed the way England wore, shopped and wore fashion forever. What began as a post shop in 1963 grew into another Kensington palace by the early 70s – a seven-storey empire of peach mirrors, black glass countertops, animal print walls and ostrich feather foliage. Biba was England’s It girl emporium, where rock stars, acting royalty (and actual royalty) spent their free time.
‘He was in heaven. There’s no big security barrier or anyone going “Can I help you?”, just Julie Christie lying in the window,’ says Delisia Price, who modeled and worked in the store, which moved to Kensington Church Street at that point since 1968. Exhibition The curator, Martin Pel, believes that Biba is a response to Hulanicki’s traumatic childhood. ‘I think it was Barbara’s way of creating a world where she was in control. Biba was something she wanted to create and be a part of that very much.’
‘Biba was Barbara’s way of creating a world in which she ruled’
Martin Football
Hulanicki was born in Poland but grew up in Jerusalem. Her father was assassinated by a Zionist extremist group when she was only 12. The last time she saw him he wore a brown suit with chalk stripes, a suit that would appear again on the floor of Biba’s store. From Palestine her family moved to Brighton and later to London, where she met her husband Stephen Fitz-Simon – or, Fitz – an advertising executive who was dealing with the store’s logistics. ‘Barbara is not an ordinary person. She is an exceptional person. She was brought up in Palestine, she knew all these great cities and she had the most amazing vision,’ says Price.
Today, Hulanicki is as exceptional as ever. She laughs phonetically – ‘woo hoo hoo! Woo hoo hoo!’ – and she ends her saddest stories with a sharp, ‘hello!’ as if to say can you believe that? For example: ‘The girls would come down the street as this huge army, and in that army were Brigitte Bardot and Barbra Streisand! Hello!’
Biba added color to gray post-war Britain. In the same year it opened, 1964, as did Alice Pollock’s boutique Quorum, which soon after began stocking the designs of the then RCA graduate, Ossie Clark. The Bohemian Granny Takes a Trip shop opened in 1966 and soon followed the likes of Zandra Rhodes and Bill Gibb. London fashion was in full swing and Biba was the cornerstone of the swinging sixties.
Biba’s cheap price tags separate it from other designers. It was high fashion together on the high street, and therefore accessible to the masses. Whether there to shop, hover on the pavement outside or lounge on the sofas, everyone wanted a slice – celebrities, too.
‘One day Fitz was on the cash desk taking the money. He looked nervous and said “Who is that man standing behind me, breathing down my neck? I think he’s a gangster!” I said, “no, it’s okay, that’s Mick Jagger watching you count the money!” It was bonkers. Mick Jagger was big into money and figures and so on. It was it’s so funny, golly,’ Hulanicki recalled.
Lilli Anderson worked at Biba from 1972 and was the last person to leave when it closed in 1975. She applied to work at Biba after seeing an advert in the Evening Standard, but was initially rejected for being too short – ‘That didn’t put me off though. I went to him again, but this time I wore platform shoes and got the job.’
She remembers being on the shop floor when Diana Ross waltzed in early one morning. ‘She came over to the home department with this belt, she asked me what I thought of it. She put it on and it fell right to the floor because she was so thin. I was quite surprised, but she bought it anyway. He looked great, if a little big!’
Anderson’s favorite memory is of a little-known band: ‘I called Robert Plant to tell him his lampshades were in, but I had to talk to everyone from Led Zeppelin before I could talk with him. They obviously had a great party.’
‘I called Robert Plant to tell him his lampshades were in, but I had to talk to everyone from Led Zeppelin before I could talk to him’
Lily Anderson
Among the likes of David Bowie, Princess Anne, Twiggy, Rod Stewart, Roxy Music and the Stones, there was one star long before she achieved fame. Young Anna Wintour was hired as a shop girl with some help from Evening Standards editor at the time, her father, Charles Wintour. Does Hulanicki remember her? ‘Be careful!’ she warns me, kicking. ‘I’m worried about your future!’
Musicians came to the store hoping to pick up girls (who worked for Freddie Mercury, who married Biba’s girlfriend Mary Austin), and eventually ended up with his own concert space on the fifth floor. At Big Biba on Kensington High Street, each floor had a different purpose. In the basement you’d find the grocery section, including surreal displays of giant Heinz baked beans and a tall Great Dane (Othello, a model of Hulanicki’s own dog) to promote dog food. The ground floor was for makeup, shoes, accessories, and ‘things you could buy in a hurry’. The first floor was women’s clothing; the second was children’s clothing; the third menswear (as well as the cleverly placed ‘Mistress Room’ lingerie sale); the fourth was a family; and the fifth was the Rainbow Room, a restaurant serving classic British cuisine, named for its colorful swirling ceiling.
The rooftop garden became famous for its flames, and once, its penguins too. ‘For the opening Barbara wanted penguins,’ explains Anderson. ‘They came from London Zoo. It was great to see a penguin up close so I went up to see them. When I came back downstairs everyone who was having lunch stopped and I looked over, I was thinking “what’s going on?”, and I looked back and all the penguins after me follow down. I think it happened because I was wearing a black trouser suit.’
Designers Steven Thomas and Tim Whitmore were responsible for transforming the store into a major event. ‘The layout and polishing of the cosmetics was extremely accurate by Tim at 5.00am one morning!’ remembers Thomas, who was revisiting his work through the pages of the newly published book Welcome to Big Biba: Inside the World’s Most Beautiful Storewhich coincides with the new exhibition.
At its peak, Biba was one of London’s top tourist attractions. But by 1975, following the miners’ strike, the three-day work week and falling property prices, Biba was forced to close. ‘When the shop was closing my husband went in and bought the Biba ones. We were blamed,’ says Annie Harker, a fan and collector since she was a schoolgirl. ‘When we separated my husband took one and I took the other.’
‘It was Freddie Mercury who told us to “put a conservation order on the roof garden” and that’s what we did’
Lily Anderson
‘It was terrible. Heartbreak.’ said Anderson. ‘They didn’t want that shop to fail, they wanted to turn it into a Hilton hotel and knock it down completely. We didn’t know how to stop it, but it was Freddie Mercury who told us to “put a conservation order on the roof garden” and that’s what we did and they couldn’t put it down.’
Biba may be gone, but the building, its influence and the memories remain. ‘Everything happened by chance in Biba. It happened and so you got a quick grip on it,’ says Hulanicki. ‘You had to look very carefully so you didn’t miss it.’ As Delisia Price said, ‘There will never be another Biba.’
Biba’s Story, 1964-1975, runs from 22 March to 8 September at the Fashion and Textile Museum (fashiontextilemuseum.org). ‘Welcome to Big Biba’ (£22; ACC Art Books) is out now.
