London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
And shopping time.
Because on this day, September 16, 1969, Biba hit the High Street.
Literally.
On that day Barbara [hoo-lah-NEET-skee]
Hulanicki moved Biba into a vast new home on Kensington High Street.
Not just a shop.
The trendiest store in Swinging London.
Still a living memory.
A difference maker.
London shopping would never be the same again.
First, though, Barbara.
Because what a story.
Barbara [hoo-lah-NEET-skee]
Hulanicki was born in Warsaw in 1936. Her father, [VEE-tolt
hoo-lah-NEET-skee]
Witold Hulanicki, was a Polish diplomat. When Barbara was very young, he was appointed Polish consul-general in Jerusalem and the family moved to Palestine.
Then tragedy.
In 1948, when Barbara was eleven, her father was abducted and murdered by members of [Leh-hee] Lehi, the militant Zionist organization also known as the Stern Gang.
Why did they murder him? Lehi accused him of spying for the Arabs. No evidence was ever produced, and the accusation was later acknowledged to be unfounded. The bitterest irony was that
[hoo-lah-NEET-skee] Hulanicki supported the Zionist cause and had befriended Lehi’s own founder, Avraham Stern. Years later, the killing was described as a terrible mistake.
What a world this place can be.
But back to Barbara and her two younger sisters. Their mother – now a widow – gathered them up and brought them to England. They settled in Brighton.
Think of that journey.
Warsaw. Jerusalem. The violent loss of her father. And then post-war Britain. Grey skies. Ration books. Utility clothing. A country where colour itself seemed to be rationed.
Barbara went to Brighton School of Art. While she was there, she entered a fashion competition run by the Evening Standard.
She won it.
She became a freelance fashion illustrator, drawing clothes for Vogue, Tatler and Women’s Wear Daily.
That’s important.
Barbara Hulanicki didn’t begin by making clothes. She began by seeing them. Drawing them. Creating a silhouette, a mood, a complete visual world.
And that was what Biba would become.
Not just dresses on rails.
A world.
In 1961, Barbara married Stephen Fitz-Simon. Fitz was an advertising man. Barbara had the eye. Fitz had the promotional flair. Together, in 1963, they started a small mail-order fashion company.
They called it Biba’s Postal Boutique.
And where did that strange, memorable little name come from?
Biba was the childhood nickname of Barbara’s youngest sister, Biruta.
Apparently, somebody told Barbara and Fitz that Biba sounded like “a charlady’s daughter.”
They thought: perfect.
Because this wasn’t fashion for duchesses, debutantes and society hostesses.
This was fashion for their daughters.
The great breakthrough came in 1964.
A pink gingham dress. Sleeveless. A matching headscarf. A little cut-out at the back.
It appeared in the Daily Mirror, priced at just 25 shillings.
The orders came flooding in.
Four thousand almost immediately. Seventeen thousand altogether.
Barbara Hulanicki had understood something the great fashion houses hadn’t.
A new generation had arrived.
Teenage girls with money of their own. Girls who didn’t want to dress like their mothers. Girls who wanted clothes that were young, slinky, daring, slightly theatrical and, above all, affordable.
That same year, Barbara and Fitz opened their first shop in Abingdon Road, just off Kensington High Street.
It was tiny. A former chemist’s shop. Dark navy walls. William Morris curtains. Barely any fitting rooms.
The clothes weren’t displayed in neat department-store rows. They were piled up, draped around and hung from old-fashioned coat stands.
And the customers descended.
The shop was stripped almost bare on its first day.
Biba moved to larger premises in Kensington Church Street in 1966.
Then, on September 16, 1969, came the great leap onto Kensington High Street.
The new shop occupied a former carpet store. It was nine times larger than its predecessor.
But this wasn’t merely a bigger clothes shop.
It was theatre.
Dark, decadent, mysterious. Mahogany screens. Art Deco lettering. Potted palms. Peacock feathers. Clothes hanging from old hat stands. Music playing. Beautiful assistants who looked as though they had stepped out of a 1930s film.
And hardly any light.
Biba was famously dark. So dark, you could barely see what you were buying.
Which was part of the seduction.
The clothes came in those unmistakable Biba colours. Plum. Prune. Rust. Mulberry. Olive. Maroon.
Colours with the lights turned down.
The dresses were long and slinky. The shoulders narrow. The sleeves tight. The faces pale. The eyes dark and smoky.
This was Swinging London with a hint of the silent screen. Greta Garbo meets a Kensington dolly bird.
Twiggy shopped there. Cilla Black shopped there. Members of the Rolling Stones wandered in.
But the real triumph of Biba was that an ordinary young woman could shop there too.
She could walk through those darkened doors, spend an affordable sum of money and emerge as somebody else.
You didn’t just buy a Biba dress.
You bought the Biba girl.
And Barbara understood something else decades before the rest of the retail world caught up.
A shop could be an experience.
A destination.
A performance.
A place to meet, linger, look and be looked at.
In 1973 came the apotheosis.
Big Biba.
Seven floors in the magnificent Art Deco Derry and Toms building further along Kensington High Street.
Fashion, furniture, cosmetics, books, food and music. A restaurant and nightclub called the Rainbow Room. And up on the roof, among the gardens, real flamingos.
Big Biba sold everything from lipstick to baked beans.
It was perhaps the world’s first great lifestyle store.
A department store dreamed up by Busby Berkeley, Greta Garbo and a particularly glamorous black cat.
It couldn’t last.
Barbara lost control of her creation. The corporate money came in. The magic seeped out. In 1975, Biba closed.
But Barbara Hulanicki carried on creating.
She eventually moved to Miami and reinvented herself as an interior designer, designing hotels in Florida, Jamaica and the Bahamas.
Appropriate, really.
Barbara had always designed worlds.
And that brings us to our word of the day.
Boutique.
It’s French, of course. A small and fashionable shop.
But follow it back and you eventually arrive at the Ancient Greek word apothēkē.
A storehouse. A place where things are put away.
It’s also the ancestor of our word apothecary.
But there was nothing remotely stored away about Biba.
Biba took fashion out of the exclusive Paris salon and put it on the London street.
Barbara [hoo-lah-NEET-skee]
Hulanicki knew what it was to lose one world and have to imagine another.
And imagining worlds was precisely what she did.
Biba wasn’t just a boutique.
It was Barbara’s world.
And on September 16, 1969, the doors opened and London poured in.
See you tomorrow.