Barbara Hulanicki on breaking guidelines and revolutionising vogue

In the Sixties, Barbara Hulanicki disrupted the stuffy, class-ridden view of vogue, and the inclusive Biba life-style modified all the things. She talks to the BBC about her extraordinary profession.

“Biba attracted troublemakers or individuals who favored to make bother,” asserts Barbara Hulanicki, the ever-energetic founding father of the legendary British Sixties and 70s label and 4 boutiques, now aged 87. Her cutting-edge retail ventures culminated in its largest, ultimate incarnation, the seven-storey Big Biba, which occupied the previous Art Deco Derry & Toms division retailer on London’s Kensington Hight Street. The latter supplied vogue, homeware, a meals corridor, magnificence salon, 500-seat restaurant within the top-floor Rainbow Room, and roof terrace with a backyard, flamingos and errant penguins (some had been as soon as discovered waddling down into the shop). Big Biba was the highpoint of a trailblazing profession that noticed Hulanicki disrupt a class-ridden, stuffy view of vogue, and usher in a extra fun-loving, youthful, inexpensive and egalitarian strategy to dressing.

Biba’s aesthetic may appear retrograde – particularly within the forward-looking Sixties context of futuristic, space-age vogue and design. But Hulanicki counterintuitively grasped the nascent enchantment of Edwardiana and Victoriana and, later, Art Deco, all poised to get pleasure from enormous revivals. Biba’s early store interiors – the unique one occupied an previous chemist on Abingdon Road, Kensington and opened in 1964 – channelled fin-de-siècle exoticism.

Hulanicki labored intently with artistic individuals who shared her mindset. Designer Julie Hodges designed Orientalist wallpaper with large-scale motifs in opulent shades like rose madder gold. The retailers had been furnished with bentwood coat stands and chairs whose curlicues echoed the sinuous traces of the splendid black-on-old-gold graphics and logos dreamt up for Biba by Antony Little (co-founder of Osborne and Little) within the mid-Sixties. “Bordello” and  “souk” had been descriptions Hulanicki and others bandied about to explain the boutiques’ interiors, the place clients not solely scrambled to purchase the most recent, low-priced clothes however had been additionally invited to lounge on their window seats or floor-level velvet cushions.

On the style entrance, publicity pictures pictured winsome fashions, faces framed by bubble curls and turbans, throats adorned by chokers; Hulanicki’s gouache or watercolour vogue illustrations for Biba pictured willowy, sooty-eyed ladies with frizzy hairdos harking back to Gustav KIimt work of bohemian beauties. By 1970, Thirties previous Hollywood started to be its precept inspiration. Nineteen-twenties-style cloche hats and feather boas had lengthy hung casually from the boutiques’ coat stands however, more and more, elaborate publicity pictures confirmed fashions, notably Twiggy, languorously reclining in liquescent satin, ankle-length, bias-cut clothes paired with towering Thirties-style platforms. The latter look was vampish – a Biba leitmotif was leopard print stamped on garments and homeware.

Yet Biba was forward-looking socially: it effortlessly espoused and promoted progressive values and a permissive spirit that helped speed up the snowballing radical social modifications of the day, equivalent to feminism, homosexual liberation and black civil rights. When, in 1971 the far-left anti-capitalist terrorist group, The Angry Brigade, detonated a bomb within the third Biba boutique – on Kensington High Street – in protest towards ladies’s enslavement to vogue, they had been lacking the purpose. Biba’s ethos was playful, providing clients a pluralist dressing-up field of appears to be like that consciously interwove excessive fashion (on a finances) with kitsch, whereas not idolising consumerism. For Hulanicki, who co-founded Biba together with her husband Stephen Fitz-Simon, who ran the enterprise aspect, providing an satisfying haven for rebels was extra vital than turning a tidy revenue.

“There was a lot cash going via the tills – each hour, somebody would take the cash out and provides it to Fitz,” recollects Hulanicki, who was born in Warsaw to Polish mother and father. “One day, a store assistant unintentionally gave a buyer a bag of cash as a substitute of the service bag of garments she had purchased.” Shoplifting was rife however was seen as a helpful indication of the success (or failure) of a brand new garment or assortment: “Everyone was welcome to be a part of our neighborhood. I’d suppose: ‘Help yourselves! If you prefer it, steal! When new inventory got here in, I’d ask the store ladies: ‘How is it promoting?’. They’d typically say, ‘Yes, it is going properly, we have had at the very least three items stolen.’ That was proof {that a} garment was a winner.”

Biba continues to exert a fascination each amongst its unique clients and as we speak’s younger vogue buffs – testomony to its lasting enchantment. London’s Fashion and Textile Museum just lately mounted the exhibition, The Biba Story: 1964-1975, which notched up record-breaking customer numbers – it confirmed how Biba “changed the way people shopped”. It’s set to tour in Edinburgh and Miami, the place Hulanicki moved to within the mid-Eighties, establishing a brand new profession as an inside designer. And, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the opening of the primary Biba boutique, a brand new e-book co-written by the present’s curator, Martin Pel, and Hulanicki – Biba: The Fashion Brand that Defined a Generation – has simply been printed. And London-based Kerry Taylor Auctions just lately held a week-long on-line exhibition and auction of Biba clothes, equipment and ephemera. 

Quite a few tomes have chronicled Biba’s 11-year historical past over the a long time, so, for Hulanicki, what’s the distinction between these and the brand new e-book? “I like this one because it’s all insiders’ views of Biba,” The e-book options reminiscences of retailer managers, patrons and fashions. “We employed folks we knew had been going to be a personality and weren’t snooty. People, primarily ladies, who perceive what was happening. People had been happy with being a part of Biba: they weren’t simply slaves or cogs in an organisation.” In the workplaces of Biba, a big bottle of Guerlain’s Mitsouko fragrance was there for workers to spritz themselves with.

Hulanicki rebelled towards the style system because it stood when she first entered the occupation as a vogue illustrator within the Fifties, having studied vogue and artwork at Brighton Art School. She then labored as any completed vogue illustrator for Vogue and Women’s Wear Daily, however she regards this work as stiff and too formal – emblematic of an anachronistic society.

A significant turning level was her creation of a relatively understated gingham gown and matching scarf commissioned by Felicity Green, vogue editor of The Daily Mirror. The easy, jauntily checked outfit – impressed by Brigitte Bardot’s Fifties get-ups in Saint Tropez – was a smash hit: 17,000 outfits had been ordered.

Hulanicki’s Aunt Sophie vastly influenced Biba’s aesthetic, though Hulanicki says she had a  “love-hate” relationship together with her domineering aunt, who adhered to outmoded social rituals. Yet, inadvertently, her garments manufactured from delicate, luxurious supplies, equivalent to crepe de chine in dusty shades not seen because the Thirties, impressed a lot of Biba’s clothes. “When we stayed together with her, she would have you ever change all through the day – put on one thing completely different for lunchtime, teatime, drinks time, time for supper.”

More severely, Aunt Sophie was censorious – a typical insult in direction of younger ladies within the Fifties and Sixties was to name them “sluts”, Hulanicki recollects, in the event that they did a lot as peroxide a part of their fringe. (Interestingly, Hulanicki’s trademark look within the late Sixties was a sharply geometric platinum bob, outsized shades and a leopard-print jacket harking back to Forties Hollywood.) One motive why Biba constituted what Hulanicki describes  “a revolt in vogue” was that its younger clients had, in her view, suffered “powerful psychological therapy at residence from their moms”. “Just after the battle, their dads weren’t there, and plenty of mums felt they needed to impose the identical self-discipline on their daughters that fathers would usually have completed.”

Biba’s success largely rested on Hulanicki subjectively basing its aesthetic and philosophy on her style – in principle, a dangerous technique. Yet her imaginative and prescient struck a chord with a whole technology. These numbered not simply Brits however Europeans. “It was thrilling that lots of our clients flocked to the shops from Paris – they made pilgrimages to Biba.”

Biba’s cosmetics vary, first launched in 1970 and incorporating such difficult however surprisingly coveted hues as vampish, synthetic chocolate brown and prune (that channelled the look of previous Hollywood’s silent-movie stars) or very pop, synthetic royal blue and inexperienced – all designed to coordinate with Biba garments – offered internationally. Customers might attempt the make-up on within the shops (exceptional anyplace else). “There was a camaraderie amongst clients making an attempt on the make-up – one thing they may all afford.”

The make-up did not simply have a skin-deep enchantment. The chromatic selection it supplied – vastly broadening the slim typical vary of pale pinks and ivories on provide elsewhere – mirrored deeper social change. Biba launched the first full range of make-up for black skin. Like lots of Biba’s new ranges, this was developed by observing and interacting with clients, says Hulanicki: “The make-up for black pores and skin was impressed by Jamaican ladies who got here into the second store and had been looking for colors that suited them. They’d are available in with their mums who had been taking care of them – and sometimes joined in. Biba was inclusive, classless, and never simply due to its worth factors.” Biba additionally supplied a make-up vary for males, which dovetailed with the prevailing androgyny of glam rock. Within three years of its launch in 1970, Biba make-up was promoting in 30 nations throughout three continents. The famously androgynous David Bowie was a daily customer to Big Biba: the brand new e-book features a {photograph} of him at a celebration there. Groundbreaking bands, from the New York Dolls to the Pointer Sisters, carried out at Big Biba’s Rainbow Room.

Biba’s all-encompassing imaginative and prescient wasn’t pre-calculated however developed organically, insists Hulanicki. “Over the years, the Biba buyer had grown up, and the corporate grew with them. She moved on from the Sixties, mini-skirted dollybird look to a extra refined fashion catered for by our Thirties-inspired types, however they had been additionally shopping for their very own houses, and this was mirrored by Big Biba’s many departments catering additionally to homeware, menswear and, following the start of our son, Witold, named after my father, kids’s put on too.” Big Biba’s complete life-style idea of Biba-branded merchandise has influenced many different retailers since Biba’s demise, from Anthropologie to Zara and Zara Home. It helped change how folks shopped – and the way folks thought.