‘I’m terribly worried about Catherine [Middleton], is she alright? It’s a bit scary. The whole royal thing could rock. You don’t realise how important it all is until you live in America,’ says 87-year-old Barbara Hulanicki, who wants updates on all things UK before leaving her Miami home to return to London this weekend. ‘I always loved the Evening Standard. It was so fabulous. So quick, in and out,’ she says, coming up for air between deliciously wicked chortles.
The fashion empress began her illustrious career with the Evening Standard in 1955, winning the swimwear design competition aged 19. ‘I got a phone call and they said, we want to let you know you’ve won the competition. I nearly died. If you’ve ever won anything, you’re in such shock. You go and eat a big cake.’ Almost 70 years later and her career has once again led her to us here at ES Magazine, this time on the eve of a major retrospective exhibition celebrating Hulanicki’s greatest achievement: Biba.
Hailed by the press as ‘the most beautiful store in the world’, Biba was far more than a fashion brand. It was a sublime hurricane that lasted just over a decade, but changed the way England dressed, shopped and consumed fashion forever. What began as a postal boutique in 1963 had grown into Kensington’s alternative 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 rockstars, acting royalty (and actual royalty) spent their free time.
‘It was heaven. No big security blokes or anybody going “Can I help you?”, just Julie Christie lying in the window,’ says Delisia Price, who modelled and worked in the shop, which at that point had moved to Kensington Church Street from 1968. Exhibition curator, Martin Pel, believes Biba was a response to Hulanicki’s traumatic childhood. ‘I think it was Barbara’s way of trying to create a world in which she was in control. Biba was something that she wanted to create and be part of that was very much her.’
‘Biba was Barbara’s way of trying to create a world in which she was in control’
Hulanicki was born in Poland but grew up in Jerusalem. Her father was assassinated by an extremist Zionist group when she was just 12. The last time she saw him he wore a brown chalk stripe suit, an outfit that would later reappear on Biba’s shop floor. 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 dealt with the logistics of the shop. ‘Barbara isn’t an ordinary person. She is an exceptional person. She was brought up in Palestine, she knew all these amazing cities and had the most wonderful vision,’ says Price.
Today, Hulanicki is as exceptional as ever. She laughs phonetically – ‘woo hoo hoo! Woo hoo hoo!’ – and punctuates the end of her most outrageous stories with a sharp, ‘hello!’ as if to say can you believe that? For example: ‘The girls would come down the street like this huge army, and in that army was Brigitte Bardot and Barbra Streisand! Hello!’
Biba injected colour into grey, post-war Britain. In the same year it opened, 1964, so did Alice Pollock’s boutique Quorum, which soon after began to stock the designs of the then-recent RCA graduate, Ossie Clark. Bohemian boutique Granny Takes a Trip opened in 1966 and soon followed the likes of Zandra Rhodes and Bill Gibb. London fashion was flourishing and Biba was the well-oiled hinge of the Sixties swing.
Biba’s cheap price tags separated it from other designers. It was high fashion meets high street, and therefore accessible to the masses. Whether there to shop, to hover on the pavement outside or lounge on the sofas, everybody wanted a slice – celebrities, too.
‘One day Fitz was on the cash desk taking the cash. He was looking nervous and he said “who’s that man standing behind me, breathing down my neck? I think he’s a gangster!” I said, “no it’s alright, that’s Mick Jagger watching you count the money!” It was bonkers. Mick Jagger was terribly into money and figures and so on. It was so funny, golly,’ remembers Hulanicki.
Lilli Anderson worked at Biba from 1972 and was the last 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 never put me off though. I went for it again, but this time I wore high platform shoes and I got the job.’
She remembers being on the shop floor when Diana Ross waltzed in early one morning. ‘She came over to the household 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 amazed, but she bought it anyway. It looked amazing, if a bit big!’
Anderson’s favourite memory involves a little known band: ‘I phoned Robert Plant to tell him that his lampshades were in, but I had to speak to every single one of Led Zeppelin before I got to speak to him. Obviously they were having quite a party.’
‘I phoned Robert Plant to tell him that his lampshades were in, but I had to speak to every single one of Led Zeppelin before I got to speak to him’
Among the likes of David Bowie, Princess Anne, Twiggy, Rod Stewart, Roxy Music and the Stones, one star was there long before she’d found fame. A young Anna Wintour was hired as a shop girl with some help from the Evening Standard’s editor at the time, her father, Charles Wintour. Does Hulanicki remember her? ‘Be careful!’ she warns me, cackling. ‘I’m worried about your future!’
Musicians frequented the shop in hope of picking up girls (which worked for Freddie Mercury, who married Biba girl Mary Austin), and eventually ended up with their own concert space on the fifth floor. At Big Biba on Kensington High Street, every floor served a different purpose. In the basement you’d find the grocery section, including surreal displays of giant Heinz baked beans and a towering 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’d buy in a hurry’. The first floor was womenswear; the second was childrenswear; the third menswear (as well as the very cleverly placed ‘Mistress Room’ selling lingerie); the fourth was household; and the fifth was the Rainbow Room, a restaurant that served classic British cuisine, named for its swirling, colourful ceiling.
The rooftop garden became known for its flamingos, and once, for its penguins too. ‘For the opening Barbara wanted penguins,’ explains Anderson. ‘They came from London Zoo. It was amazing to see a penguin that close so I went up to see them. When I came back downstairs everybody who was having lunch stopped and looked over, I was thinking “what is going on?”, and I looked back and the penguins had all followed me down. I think it’s because I was wearing a black trouser suit.’
Those responsible for transforming the store into the paradise it came to be were designers Steven Thomas and Tim Whitmore. ‘The painstakingly accurate layout and polishing of the cosmetics was by Tim at 5.00am one morning!’ remembers Thomas, who has been revisiting their work through the pages of the freshly republished book Welcome to Big Biba: Inside the Most Beautiful Store in the World, which coincides with the new exhibition.
At its peak, Biba was one of the most visited tourist attractions in London. But by 1975, following the miners’ strike, the three-day work week and plummeting property prices, Biba was forced to close. ‘When the shop was closing down my husband went in and bought the Biba heads. We were devastated,’ says Annie Harker, a fan and collector since she was a school girl. ‘When we separated my husband took one head and I took the other.’
‘It was Freddie Mercury who said to us “put a preservation order on the roof garden” which is what we did’
‘It was terrible. Heartbreaking.’ says Anderson. ‘They didn’t want that shop to succeed, 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 said to us “put a preservation order on the roof garden” which is what we did and they never could knock it down.’
Biba may be gone, but the building, its impact and the memories remain. ‘Everything happened by chance in Biba. It happened and so you grabbed it quickly,’ says Hulanicki. ‘You had to watch very carefully so you didn’t miss it.’ As put by Delisia Price, ‘There will never be another Biba.’
