I think their main store should still be on carnaby street but i'm not sure,let me check.....
The store that soared
It was exotic, chaotic, eccentric and charming – and it put Swinging London firmly at the centre of the world. But eventually Biba got too big for its gold wellingtons. As the 40th anniversary of the first Biba store approaches,
Emma Soames describes how a small boutique grew into a department store – leaving a trail of debt and fond memories
In 1972 life in Paris where I was living with my parents in the British Embassy was stylish, very old- fashioned and rather formal. That summer Marie-Helene de Rothschild gave a fête champêtre at an exquisite château near Paris. The dress code said “Pastorale”. The French were all dripping in their finest couture, but Paris fashion was pretty dull in those days, to be honest.
I wore a frock from Biba – a blue and white gingham dress that was a witty parody of a milkmaid’s frock, with little raised shoulders and a very cinched-in waist: it was fresh, pretty and young and cost £20. The French cooed over me – comme elle est drolle! – but they were not keen for their daughters to follow suit. Le style anglais then meant only one thing – “cheap” clothes which thus released young people from the tyranny of being taken shopping by their mothers; it meant dangerously short skirts worn by girls with fringes who didn’t speak and wore plum lipstick.
So there I was, living in Paris with designers like Pierre Balmain and Pierre Cardin begging to lend me their couture confections, and all I wanted to do was get on a boat and come back to London and buy black bags full of Biba clothes. I slouched around the British Embassy in men’s rugger shirts worn as dresses, tiny miniskirts and knitted cotton jersey shirts with mutton chop sleeves that were so narrow I could hardly do them up. And this while the French of my age were stuck in knee-length kilts and lambswool turtlenecks.
The story of Biba is quite simply one of the most extraordinary retail stories of our time. No department store chief or budding brandmeister should be allowed down to the corner without reading this coolest of rags to riches and back to rags story that befell what was the first fashion brand. Over the 12 years of its existence, Biba ended up producing everything from clothes to food, shoes – oh those boots – to children’s clothes, lingerie, wallpaper and china. And all of it, including the logos, the make-up in dangerous colours and the black lacquer stands it was sold from, all came from the head of one woman, the incomparable Barbara Hulanicki.
Like everyone who wasn’t old – old then being over 25 – I cut my fashion milk teeth in Biba. In a world entirely designed by post-war austerity, the store was a mecca not just for shopping but for hanging out. It represented everything that was cool in an age when the world in general just didn’t do cool. Paris most certainly didn’t. Indeed, cool lived in Memphis when Biba opened its first tiny store in Abingdon Road in 1964. Three stores and ten years later, hubris kicked in. Backed by Dorothy Perkins, Hulanicki and her husband Fitz bought dear old Derry and Toms and opened a whole department store. It was Harrods on drugs. Six floors of dark retail space pumped through with rock music and on top of it the Rainbow Room, which became the mothership for the British punk movement and home from home for New York acts like Manhattan Transfer, the Pointer Sisters and, most dangerously of all, the New York Dolls. Charmingly, all the groups who performed were expected to eat a three-course dinner before a set. So the audience sat and solemnly watched them eat. Unfortunately, a victim of its own stunning success, Biba became more of a tourist destination than a shop and the big bad wolves moved in. Dorothy Perkins sold to British Land. They moved in the management consultants and six months later closed it down.
Biba was tremendously important on many levels. First of all, cool people didn’t talk at all in the early Seventies and Biba shop assistants were fantastically cool. It was often quite difficult to buy anything since the shop assistants were instructed not to approach the customers and since they were cool they of course didn’t talk. (Raquel Welch once ordered a sales assistant out of her dress then and there so she could buy it.) Shoplifting was famously prevalent and indeed at the bitter end, when it was closing forever, customers didn’t bother to wait for the closing-down sale; they just walked out with bundles of clothes.
Secondly, in a world then exclusively lit by 100-watt bulbs, Biba was dark. So dark that your mother couldn’t see inside and indeed eventually neither could anyone else: the sales figures dropped and the shoplifting increased. You sort of felt your way into the clothes either in the then revolutionary Egyptian communal changing rooms or on the shop floor itself. And what clothes! Barbara Hulanicki pretty much invented the velvet trouser suit, rehabilitated the boa, took fabrics like cotton jersey and made fantastically cut clothes in tiny sizes. She is a heroine in so many ways but I suspect she may also have single-handedly invented anorexia. I spent most of my late teens saving up to have a rib removed.
Biba’s character was unlike that of any other retail operation I have ever heard of. Along with grandiose ideas and an extraordinarily laid-back attitude to massive amounts of shoplifting, its characteristics included a notorious attitude to paying its suppliers and an incredible work ethic (the pay and hours were notorious and most people worked there just to get the staff discount). It was a charming mixture of cool, quirkiness and naiveté. In Big Biba, they wittily kitted out the area for maternity clothes with huge pieces of furniture so that large mothers would feel tiny.
Biba entranced London and riveted the rest of the world for a decade. It became a destination bigger than the Tower of London. In its famous piece on swinging London, a writer in
Time magazine said in the now hilariously quaint language of that time: “Biba is a must scene for the switched on dolly-bird at least twice a week.” Everyone wanted a piece of it. Even the French. In the late Sixties, an enterprising nightclub owner hired four Biba sales assistants to go to the South of France as Les Minis Anglaises just to play records and look gorgeous. “It was totally mad but surprisingly innocent,” said one of the girls. Which sort of says it all, really.
BIBA, The Biba Experience, by Alwyn W Turner, is published by the Antique Collectors’ Club, Tel: 01394 389950, www.antique-acc.com
Lily Cole was the star of the show, seen here in a typically bright Biba colour – sunshine yellow. Accessorised with a black headscarf and heavy dark eyes, Lily’s look had a little something of the bumble-bee about it.
