Why (like all of the Swinging Sixties generation) I REFUSE to retire
By the woman who founded Biba – and is launching a new collection, aged 81
Barbara Hulanicki, ObE, the woman who invented biba, the fashion store that set London alight in the Swinging Sixties (and became a hangout for Twiggy, the rolling Stones and Marianne Faithfull), is telling me why her generation grew up to change the world.
‘London was so grey in the late Fifties. Young people now don’t realise there was no food. If you went to a restaurant you ate spaghetti with tomato sauce out of a Heinz tin. It was awful. No one travelled, so no one knew about food.’
Life was in black and white, not colour. Pubs were only open for a couple of hours a day. There were no concerts or gigs. and don’t get her started on the shops.
‘The clothes were terrible. There were no shoes, no make-up. I was earning money and there was nothing to buy. I used to go up and down the streets trying to find anything that audrey Hepburn wore in the 1953 film Sabrina. I wanted her earrings — even one would have been enough,’ she sighs.
Nothing was designed for teenagers. So clearly the landscape was ripe for an explosion of young people with disposable incomes choosing their own clothes.
and boy did Hulanicki change the landscape with biba, the forerunner of today’s High Street chain stores. It’s ironic that barbara, who wears a ‘school uniform’ of black, is the woman who got the uptight brits wearing prints, leopard skin, feather boas and glitter.
She made shopping a social event and launched the first-ever mail-order fashion catalogue. but most importantly she created designs an emerging female working class could afford.
along with Mary Quant she put the mini skirt on the map, though biba’s famous micromini was the result of a mistake. The cotton jersey they used shrank.
‘You needed to let the material rest before sending it into manufacturing so that you cut it properly, but once our manufacturers didn’t do this. We hung the skirts up in store and when we returned the next morning found they had shrunk dramatically!’
barbara went home feeling sick, saying, ‘We’re bust, this is the end; all these skirts barely cover a girl’s crotch.’
but then husband Stephen Fitz-Simon, whom she married when she was 25 and who helped run the business, rang to say customers were running out of the store with the bandagestyle skirts still shrinking in their hands!
With her ash blonde bob, black T-shirt, trousers, skinny jacket, and ubiquitous dark glasses, Hulanicki looks decades younger than 81. Married for 36 years with one son, she lost Fitz-Simon, whom she calls Fitz, to cancer in 1997, and now lives alone in a converted Twenties apartment in Miami.
She is smart, funny and self-deprecating, the sort of woman you’d like to sink a martini with. She fizzes with energy, throwing her arms around as she chats.
SHE’S excited to be one of the Sixties trailblazers celebrated in Michael Caine’s new film My Generation. Made to mark his 85th birthday, the documentary sees Caine travel back in time to Sixties London to talk to icons including barbara, Paul McCartney, Twiggy, David bailey, Mary Quant, The Stones and David Hockney.
The film features unseen archive material — images of Carnaby Street, Piccadilly Circus, gritty South London where Caine grew up, and barbara’s famous ‘big biba’ shop on Kensington High Street, which drew more than a million visitors a year.
‘It’s amazing footage,’ barbara marvels. In the film, Caine explores why his generation — born in the Thirties and Forties — was so successful. They were hardly born with a silver spoon in their mouth, living through a world war and rationing. Many of the Swinging Generation came from working class families. (Caine grew up on the Heygate council estate in South London; barbara arrived as a Polish-born refugee in England in 1948).
but what united them was a spirit of rebellion. between them they revolutionised fashion, music, acting and art.
To be young, smart and in your 20s in London in the early Sixties was a gift, barbara recalls. ‘Everybody had a job, they came in and rented bedsits in places like Kensington and Notting Hill.’
She adds: ‘They were in little rooms, sharing bathrooms. I always remember Fitz saying: “Ok our clothes have to be £3, because women earn £9 a week; £3 on food, £3 on rent and £3 for a biba dress.” ’
Unlike their parents, they weren’t afraid of their social betters. They demanded change. ‘You were considered a rebel over the most stupid things,’ barbara says. ‘Wearing black was a rebellion, you only wore it for funerals. and no one wore purple. So obviously black and purple became biba’s big colours.’ What’s so fascinating is that most of the Swinging Generation still work full time in their 80s. Hockney is producing new work for major exhibitions worldwide. Caine has four new films this year. The Stones in their mid-70s are touring this summer. and barbara has no intention of retiring. She designs wallpaper for Graham & brown and there’s a new fashion collection coming out with King’s road boutique, baar & bass, (fans include the Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Eugenie). Growing up in a family of strong women (her father died when she was 12), she says she was always a natural feminist. as a consequence biba was a very female-orientated company. ‘They didn’t need fancy offices. They were amazing when they worked together, there was no nonsense. If there was a “drone”, you know one of those girls who look amazing, but do f*** all, they would get rid of her themselves.’
If anything, she says, Caine’s film doesn’t show how strong women were.
‘I’m sorry Mr Caine,’ she jokes. ‘but the girls who came to London were toughies. Fitz was absolutely terrified of them. His office was next to the changing room and he’d hear them describing what they’d been doing and say: “I can’t take it.” ’
barbara was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1936, the eldest of three girls. The family relocated to Jerusalem in 1936 when her father, Witold, was made the Polish Consular General there. after the fall of Poland in 1939, he remained in Palestine, working with the british Mandate authorities during World War II.
as a diplomat’s family they were wealthy, but Jerusalem had no shops, so her mother had to make their clothes and cosmetics. but then tragedy struck. When barbara was 12, just months before the formation of
the Israeli state, her father was abducted and shot by a Zionist paramilitary group, who were fighting to rid Palestine of the British. ‘I can’t talk about it without getting very upset.’
Her mother went to pieces. They lost everything but were rescued by her mother’s wealthy, older half-sister, Aunt Sophie, who lived at London’s Ritz hotel.
‘She said: “I’m so sorry I can’t afford to put you up at the Ritz. We’re all going to have slum it in Brighton.”
Slum it! It was six suites along the sea front,’ she roars.
‘So we had a roof over our head, but there wasn’t food and drink like people are used to now. We could not believe the rations — in 1948 there was one egg a week, 2oz of cheese. Have you ever seen 2oz of cheese?’ she marvels.
‘That’s why people were skinny, goodness me.’ Sophie wanted Barbara to go to Oxford. But her niece, who had been making her own clothes since she was 16, insisted on studying fashion illustration at Brighton Art College.
HeR family considered Barbara embarrassing. It was only when, in her early 20s, she met her husband, advertising executive Fitz-Simon, at a party, that she found her partner in crime.
‘He was amazing, he said: “Just stop listening to them all yapping at you. everybody’s wrong and you’re right.” I said: “Ok, we’ll try that,” ’ she says dryly.
In 1964 she and Fitz started a mail-order business, but weren’t doing terribly well until fashion editor Felicity Green (the first woman to make associate editor on Fleet Street) asked her to design a dress for readers inspired by Brigitte Bardot. Barbara came up with a pink gingham dress with a round hole in the back and a head scarf, priced 25 shillings (£3 today). It came in one size — 8 — and attracted 17,000 orders, enabling her to start her own boutique.
Biba was her younger sister Biruta’s nickname. They needed a name in a rush and tried it out on a few friends. Is her sister proud to have a legendary store named after her? ‘She said it was hell — still does.’
Their first shop was a former chemist’s shop in a Kensington side street, with sofas for the boyfriends to sit on and approachable staff — unlike the snooty ‘madam shops’.
It soon became associated with TV music show Ready, Steady, Go — the producer would send Cilla and Sandie Shaw there to get dressed.
The shop was a dressing up box, with girls wriggling into mini dresses. every piece sold out as soon as it hit the shelf. Barbara then launched a mailorder fashion catalogue — Helmut Newton took the photographs — so women outside London could buy her designs.
The Biba aesthetic, with its art-nouveaux meets art deco look, was inspired by old Hollywood — Dietrich, Garbo, American musicals. Barbara would also recreate boas, silks, and sequined skull caps, all inspired by Aunt Sophie’s Thirties aesthetic.
Touchingly the seven guinea Biba pinstripe suit — their first real sales success — was inspired by her father. The last time she saw him, he was wearing a pinstripe suit.
Age 30 she had her son Witold (named after her father). ever style-conscious she designed black Biba nappies for him.
In 1966 they moved to a site on Kensington Church Street and Biba became the epicentre of cool. According to her friend Twiggy, ‘She changed fashion in england singlehanded.’
Members of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks frequently dropped in. ‘The girls were so blasé about the men who came in to flirt with them — I mean genuinely blasé.
‘Twiggy used to pop into my shop in Brighton every Saturday and I used to think “Who is that beautiful skinny girl?” She was a real privilege to get to know.
‘And the boys went on to become famous musicians of course. Then people like Sonny and Cher would come in and I would turn to Fitz and say “Who are these weirdos?! But I love their trousers!” ’
AS BuSINeSS boomed they opened Big Biba, a six-storey art deco building (now M&S) overlooking High Street Kensington, in 1973.
It became London’s second biggest tourist destination after the Tower of London and sold cosmetics, homewares, menswear, cat food, even Baked Beans. Time magazine called it ‘the most “in” shop for gear’. Hulanicki’s aunt still referred to it as Barbara’s junk shop.
The store was decorated with mirrored pillars, peacock feathers and faux Tiffany lamps. On the top floor was the Rainbow Room restaurant and nightclub.
Barbara designed the space as a castle with a moat and live flamingos and penguins frolicked in the rooftop garden.
But the party only lasted a few years. In 1975 Biba went bust after expanding too quickly and had to sell 75 per cent of its shares to Dorothy Perkins. After disagreements with the board over creative control, and a failed buyout by British Land in 1976, Hulanicki and Fitz walked away with little.
But the Sixties generation are great survivors. The couple moved to Brazil with their son, then eight, and started a new shop in Sao Paulo.
She stayed, creating T-shirts for hip Seventies labels Cacharel and Fiorucci, until in 1987 Ronnie Wood asked her to design a hotel for him in Miami. She’s lived there ever since.
For the Baar & Bass collection, out in April, she has created five Seventies-inspired sketches for limited-edition pieces — including a Twiggy top, Jerry jumpsuit and Jagger maxi dress. ‘Barbara’s work ethic is amazing,’ says the boutique’s owner Maddy Chesterton.
But then Barbara’s mantra is ‘If I rest, I rust’. Paint, re-do your house, make mistakes, and keep working, she insists. ‘What would I do if I retire?’ she scoffs. ‘The gardening?!’
My Generation is in cinemas March 14 with a live Q&a with Michael Caine, broadcast from BFi Southbank. the film is out March 16. mygenerationmovie.co.uk