In the 1960s, Barbara Hulanicki disrupted the stuffy, class-ridden view of fashion, and the inclusive Biba lifestyle changed everything. She talks to the BBC about her extraordinary career. "Biba attracted troublemakers or people who liked to make trouble," asserts Barbara Hulanicki, the ever-energetic founder of the legendary British 1960s and 70s label and four boutiques, now aged 87.
Her cutting-edge retail ventures culminated in its largest, final incarnation, the seven-storey Big Biba, which occupied the former Art Deco Derry & Toms department store on London's Kensington Hight Street. The latter offered fashion, homeware, a food hall, beauty salon, 500-seat restaurant in the top-floor Rainbow Room, and roof terrace with a garden, flamingos and errant penguins (some were once found waddling down into the store). Big Biba was the highpoint of a trailblazing career that saw Hulanicki disrupt a class-ridden, stuffy view of fashion, and usher in a more fun-loving, youthful, affordable and egalitarian approach to dressing.
Biba's aesthetic might seem retrograde – especially in the forward-looking 1960s context of futuristic, space-age fashion and design. But Hulanicki counterintuitively grasped the nascent appeal of Edwardiana and Victoriana and, later, Art Deco, all poised to enjoy huge revivals. Biba's early shop interiors – the original one occupied an old chemist on Abingdon Road, Kensington and opened in 1964 – channelled fin-de-siècle exoticism.
Hulanicki worked.