Biba: Final call for London exhibition about a brand that changed the fashion zeitgeist forever

There’s less than a month left to see one of the most profound fashion exhibitions in London, The Biba Story 1964 to 1975, at the Fashion and Textile Museum.

It comes nearly five decades after the legendary brand shut up shop but its legacy is far from finished. The fashion industry wouldn’t be what it is today without Biba’s prominent chapter in the history books, and this exhibition is a testament to that.

Biba superseded the definition of simply being a trendy store, a celebrity hangout or a haven for the hopeful, and to define it as such would be a fashion crime in itself.

If the brand existed in today’s market, one may think it could fall into the “fast-fashion” category. But back then there was no such thing, which perhaps is the secret to its success, as one of the first brands to democratise fashion in the mid-late 20th century.

Travellers lucky enough to be visiting England’s capital city before September 8, be sure to add the fascinating exhibition curated by Martin Pel into your itinerary.

And for those who won’t be in town, let’s take a look at the fashion label’s illustrious journey together. Pull up a chair and put the kettle on because this is one hell of a ride.

Biba founder Barbara Hulanicki was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1936. She grew up in Palestine until the age of 12, when she emigrated to England to live with an aunt following the assassination of her diplomat father Witold Hulanicki. He was the Polish Consul General to the Middle East, stationed in Jerusalem.

After studying at the Brighton School of Art, she achieved early success with an Evening Standard fashion award for an original beachwear design and went on to work as a freelance fashion illustrator for prestigious editorial publications including Vogue and WWD.

Barbara founded Biba as a mail-order company in 1963 with her late husband Stephen Fitz-Simon. It was named after Hulanicki’s younger sister, Biruta. They regularly released new designs at a low cost and filled a gap in the market for accessible yet stylish attire.

But everything changed the following year when they commissioned a dress for The Daily Mirror’s fashion editor Felicity Green and laid the foundations for what would become one of the most influential labels of the United Kingdom’s fashion revolution.

The commission garment was a pink gingham shift dress. Simple enough, right? Well, we all know the simplest things in life can sometimes be the most pivotal.

“I had bought the sugar pink gingham in John Lewis, and had assumed that all the mills in Manchester were stacked with bales of sugar pink gingham. We sent the dress into the Mirror and never gave it another thought,” Barbara writes in her autobiography, From A to Biba.

Little did she know her next thought of the dress would be one of immense accomplishment. It became Biba’s first major success selling more than 17,000 units and setting the tone for what would define the swinging 60s of feather boas, leopard-print coats and of course — shift dresses.

In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, Biba was the world’s first lifestyle brand. It brought affordable fashion to everyday folk, en masse, and became deservingly popular for it.

“(The typical typing wage) was £10 a week! My husband, Fitz, was in an advertising agency, and he said, ‘Three pounds a week goes on food. Three pounds a week goes on rent. And three pounds a week goes to Biba’,” Barbara told Dazed earlier this year.

The duo’s mail-order business framework provided them with a low-cost, economical method of assessing the popularity of designs, but scale and growth were inevitable.

Barbara and Stephen dived into the world of bricks-and-mortar in 1964 with the opening of their first store on London’s Abingdon Road.

It wasn’t long before the brand outgrew this small location. Biba relocated to Kensington Church Street before “making it” to the esteemed Kensington High Street.

Despite the contestable belief that Biba was the birthplace of fast-fashion, the premise that it had a revolutionary impact on (and arguably beyond) the British fashion landscape is simply undeniable. Barbara and Stephen were revolutionaries in every fashionable sense of the word.

Biba was the first brand to actively support the nascent queer community in the editorial space, two decades prior to other fashion houses like Dolce & Gabanna. It released the first full cosmetic range for black skin and men. It was the first shop to accommodate the London masses, rather than just those with money. It transformed the retail experience and some of history’s biggest names spent their youth visiting and/or working at Biba.

Dame Lesley Lawson DBE, aka Twiggy, first visited the store when she was a grammar school girl at 14. She went on to not only become the face of the brand, but the face of sixties mod fashion.

American Vogue editor-in-chief and global CEO of Conde Naste, Anna Wintour, began her career in fashion when working at the Biba store at the ripe age of 15.

In today’s age, lucrative social media advertisements firmly hold the reins of influence in the fashion industry. But back then, word-of-mouth was fashion’s formidable force and it didn’t take long for word to catch on that Biba’s Kensington High Street store was the place to be.

The Rolling Stones, Brigitte Bardot, Yoko Ono and The Beatles were just a few on the string of celebrity heavyweights to make Biba their stomping ground. Why? You may be wondering… because Biba had it all.

The seven-storey Art Deco building had 15 departments of everything from affordable clothing — women’s, men’s, and children’s — to a bookshop and a food hall.

Women chatted as they filled communal change rooms and slipped into micro-mini skirts and shift dresses. Young men mingled on the rooftop garden surrounded by real-life flamingos. Yes, the bird.

Biba’s onsite-restaurant known as The Rainbow Room had a roaring party presence that attracted musicians from across the globe — the New York Dolls, Freddie Mercury and The Pointer Sisters were among many to let their hair down in the atmospheric restaurant. David Bowie and rock band Roxy Music even recorded music videos there.

In the depths of its heyday, Biba was estimated to see more than 100,000 people pass through its doors weekly. Its unmitigated success continued to surge towards an unfathomable level of popularity.

In fact, the act of summarising Biba’s unbelievable omnipresence is a challenge in itself. One we may never fully comprehend. It wasn’t just in the upper echelons of London society, Biba was the upper echelons of London society.

Barbara hit a roadblock in 1975 after battling with major shareholders about the brand’s future and unfortunately the Biba bubble burst.

Barbara decided she would rather shut the doors than stray from her original vision. Just like that, the near-mythic Biba fairytale had come to a despondent end.

In light of the recent sequence of department store closures across the world — including American retail titan Macy’s closing of 150 stores, David Jones Australia slashing floor space and Britain witnessing the closure of 6000 retail outlets in five years — there’s never been a more fitting moment to reflect on the golden age of department stores, with Biba standing out as one of the greats.

Biba was entrenched in the fabric of Britain’s fashion evolution. We may have lost its physical presence in the world, but Biba’s exponential influence continues to be felt through every thread of the fashion industry today.

WYNTK (what you need to know): about the exhibition

• The Biba Story 1964 to 1975, is at London’s Fashion Textile Museum until September 8.
• The museum is open Tuesdays to Saturdays, 11am to 6pm.
• Tickets are £12.65 (concessions may apply).
• To coincide with the retrospective exhibition, the museum gift shop is selling a variety of Biba books in-store and online at fashiontextilemuseum.org.