SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Less than $3 per week
In 1964, Polish-born fashion illustrator Barbara Hulanicki opened a small fashion boutique on Abingdon Road in Kensington, and “London’s landscape was irrevocably replaced,” claimed the London Evening Standard. Sixty years later, a new exhibition at the city’s Museum of Fashion and Textiles celebrates “The Cultural Significance of the Iconic Boutique. “
The store was called Biba, the nickname for Biruta, Hulanicki’s younger sister, and the logo was designed to be “affordable and available to everyone. “
Hulanicki’s adventure at the center of world fashion began with “a short pink plaid dress animated by the one Brigitte Bardot wore in Saint-Tropez in 1963,” The Guardian said. Hulanicki’s dress, which opens the new exhibition, charged 25 shillings and “changed the course” of her life, after she published it in a fashion article in the Mirror newspaper in 1964. On the same day, 17,000 readers mailed in for the commission business she also run. her husband, Stephen Fitz-Simon.
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts, news, as well as research from multiple angles.
Barbara Hulanicki opened a Biba store on Kensington Church Street in 1966.
Fitz-Simon, a former advertising director, is credited with keeping Biba’s costs down. “He found that an average secretary earned £10 a week,” The Guardian said, estimating that “£3 could buy a new dress. “in Biba and, at the same time, they leave them enough spare parts for rent and food. “
In addition to its low prices, Biba stood out for its décor, “like no other, with blacked-out windows, communal cloakrooms and high-volume second-hand furniture,” Vogue said.
Building on his advertising success, Hulanicki opened a larger Biba store on Kensington Church Street in 1966, before moving to an even larger store on Kensington High Street in 1969. But in 1973 he moved into a nearby seven-story Art Deco building. that cemented his “vision of a complete lifestyle proposition,” the Standard said. Biba’s product line expanded to include everything from “long dresses with flared sleeves and leopard-print coats to lobster soup cans, pin-up card packs, lampshades, and makeup,” a “decidedly modern” technique that was then considered radical.
Biba was also ahead of its time in terms of the in-store grocery shopping experience. The garments for sale in the “legendary store” were “tossed on racks and surrounded by feather chandeliers in low light,” The Guardian said. Silk underwear and sheets were sold in a “Mistress Room,” and the store also housed a restaurant-nightclub with a ceiling “illuminated with the colors of the rainbow. “On the rooftop, “shoppers can simply have tea next to flamingos perched on the edge of a pond. “
Singer Cilla Black and presenter Cathy McGowan sign up for other shoppers to queue up to enter the new Biba store on Kensington Church Street.
It’s no wonder, according to The Guardian, that on Saturdays the queue for Biba “runs down the main street, with consumers ranging from teenagers to the Rolling Stones and Twiggy. “
The store “closed its doors for good” in 1975, the brand’s popularity endured, and now enthusiasts flocked to the new retrospective “The Biba Story, 1964-1975. “
The “perfectly preserved miniskirts” and “leopard-print coats” on display are a fashion “time capsule,” according to the Financial Times. And they also remind us, said the exhibition’s curator, Martin Pel, that “low-cost fashion does not have to be disposable. “
“The Story of Biba, 1964-1975” will be open until September 8 at the Museum of Fashion and Textiles