How the DAILY Mirror changed the world of fashion
Biba became a Swinging Sixties hit after editor found young designer
On Friday, May 1, 1964, the Daily Mirror made its readers an offer that might not sound out of the ordinary – a pink gingham dress and matching headscarf. But it was an offer that would change the fashion world.
For the designer of that fashion forward outfit was Bárbara Hulanicki, a fashion illustrator commissioned by Mirror fashion editor Felicity Green.
Soon she would be known worldwide as the woman who created the fashion house at the heart of Swinging Sixties London: Biba.
Felicity gave this future fashion icon her first introduction, writing: “This is Bárbara. Now she’s a dress manufacturer as well as a fashion artist.”
Almost overnight, Biba’s Postal Boutique (named after Bárbara’s youngest sister Biruta, whose nickname was Biba) went from small business to brand of the moment.
It sold 17,000 of the 25 shilling gingham dress – and a few months later its first shop in Abingdon Road, Kensington, opened.
“I was great friends with Felicity and she really believed in the young market, nobody else was catering for teens at the time,” recalls Bárbara. “She wanted me to do a dress – she said in my natural style.
“Felicity wanted to sell it for 25 shillings. When I went home and told [my husband] and he was aghast that I agreed! It was a very good price!
“But I think that is so important: that fashion is not something only the very wealthy can access. We expected to sell a couple of hundred! The Mirror kick-started everything.”
The market was really lacking.. teenagers had money to spend
BARBARA HULANICKI ON SELLING 17,000 OUTFITS
Suddenly, Biba was at the heart of London’s pop culture scene and worn by everybody who was anybody, from Britt Ekland, Cilla Black, Twiggy and Julie Christie to Marc
Bolan, Freddie Mercury and David Bowie.
Now, nearly 60 years later, Bárbara’s back in London for a new exhibition into her gamechanging designs.
So enduring is her legacy that even at 87, Kate Moss is a fan and she had the likes of Twiggy desperate to party with her at Thursday night’s private view. “I owe it all to the Mirror and Felicity,” says Bárbara, who got an OBE for services to fashion in 2012.
“Back then, the market was really lacking for teenage girls who all had jobs, because they knew how to type, so had the money to spend.
“They had all left their homes in the suburbs, [and gone] to London where everything was exciting. It was fabulous – the boys! The bands! Going out dancing in the London clubs.”
Post-war Britain was grey and bleak, but by 1964, the world was changing – the first generation born after 1945 was reaching adulthood, and they were not going to live like their parents.
It was the decade of The Beatles, the Pill, youth TV, Woodstock, and young women finally getting independence like never before.
The London scene was the epitome of cool, and Biba was the epitome of the London scene. As Bárbara once said, her label and store weren’t “just selling dresses, it’s a whole way of life”.
Fresh from a flight from her home in
the US, Bárbara tells us: “There were no dads in those days – they had been killed off, [in the war] so the mums were really giving the kids a hard time – and the kids wanted to do their own thing.”
And as the brand continued to grow it moved premises, first to nearby Church Street in 1966. By the 1970s it became a big hit for its unisex fashions – even when they had not actually been designed as such.
“A lot of the boys were small and they liked the prints,” says Bárbara. “Marc Bolan had the sequin jackets.
There was no shame in going and buying the girls’ stuff.”
Freddie Mercury was introduced to the dazzling world of Biba through his then-girlfriend Mary Austin, and sparked a distinct feature of Biba shopping – the seating.
“He was so lovely, always in the shop, hanging around waiting for his girlfriend,” says Bárbara of Freddie.
“When I went shopping I could never get my husband Fitz to go with me. So I said to him the only way we’re going to do this for Biba is if we make the shops look like sitting rooms and have music. People would meet in the shop hang out because it was free and then go dancing at night.”
It was the first time that shopping was really felt more than just transactional for young people. And that led to Biba’s biggest move: launching the seven-storey Big Biba in Kensington High Street in 1973.
The store attracted a million visitors a week. Each floor had a theme, including men’s, books, a food market and a home floor which even sold statues. It oozed art deco and whimsical design, like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory for arty fashionistas.
It was all a big change from where
Bárbara’s life started. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1936, but raised in Jerusalem, until aged 12 when the family moved to Brighton after her father Witold was assassinated by nationalist organisation Lehi in 1948.
She later moved to London, where she met her husband Stephen FitzSimon – or Fitz, as she calls him. He gave up his job as an advertising exec to help manage the first shop.
But he was not the only one who spent all his time there. So did one of its biggest fans and earliest supporters: Twiggy. Bárbara, who affectionately calls her Twigs, recalls: “She was still at school, but always there. She had her incredible figure, long legs and not much boobs, which was a big thing then.
“Then her career took off and she’d ask us to make one off pieces for her.”
One of her most iconic looks was a leopard print robe which is on show in the exhibition.
As a big part of pop culture, Biba was not just about fashion, but parties. Most were in the Rainbow Room restaurant, where stars like Liberace rubbed shoulders with shoppers.
One that sticks in Bárbara’s memory is a 1970s New Year’s Eve do in the Rainbow Room and Big Biba Roof Gardens – later Kensington Roof Gardens.
“It was a party for the artist Andrew Logan,” she says. “He had an Alternative Miss World, where the bizarre is beautiful! It was so fun!” As well as Twiggy, singer Cilla Black and presenter Cathy McGowan were also “Biba Girls”. In more recent years, Biba has been Kate Moss’s go-to look. She told The Biba Story curator Martin Pel she had a Biba outfit she “wore to death in the nineties”.
Martin, who has written a book about Biba to be published later this year, revealed Kate has now passed it down to her daughter Lila.
Bárbara has never fallen out of love with the Biba movement. But in 1975, 11 years after the Mirror offer, she and Fitz sold up after the birth their son Witold, now 56, named after her dad.
Much of the reason was the financial strain of the giant undertaking. The family moved to Brazil and on to Miami where Ronnie Wood hired her to design South Beach club Woody’s.
In the mid-90s, they moved to New York and ran a boutique before Fitz became ill. He died in 1997 aged 60.
Now back where it all began, Bárbara can’t help but smile as she poses by that gingham dress – one of many designs on show. Along with a cutting from the Mirror, of course.
■ The Biba Story, 1964-1975 is at the London’s Fashion & Textile Museum until September 8, Tuesdays to Saturdays. Visit fashiontextilemuseum.org