Barbara hulanicki george harrison
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Her shop was the first to stay open until 8pm, she played Beatles' hits loud to turn on the shoppers, and turned a blind eye when customers stripped off to try on her clothes.
Ms Hulanicki now lives in Miami, where she designs fantasy interiors for hotels. In 1987 she moved to Miami Beach, Florida, where she opened an interior design business, designing hotels for Chris Blackwell in Jamaica and the Bahamas, and reimagining several Art Deco hotels in Miami Beach, including a bar for Ronnie Woods of The Rolling Stones.
In 2021, Hulanicki started a new venture with virtual reality company, BrandLab360, to create a new label titled ‘Hula’.
‘Quant and Courrèges were doing futuristic stuff,’ says Hulanicki, while she turned to the past. Few women who bought Biba can still wear their clothes. So Barbara got a friend in the cheaper end of the rag-trade to make it up in quantities at a next-to-nothing-price.
Hundreds of people sent for it. I bought one.
‘Biba’s of Kensington Church Street has style and originality,’ reported the Guardian in 1967. It also includes her successful earlier career in fashion illustration and her later achievements in interior design and architecture. She slowly watched her empire subside in a series of boardroom battles that are described in painful detail in her autobiography, From A to Biba, published in 1983.
Allan Thomas, who designed prints for Biba on a freelance basis after graduating from Central School of Art in 1972, believes that the business also lost its creative energy in those final years.
If Barbara Hulanicki opened another shop now and took us old cronies back, I'd be the first there - and I would take my daughters along, too. But over the label’s 11-year life there was a trend away from the youthful dolly bird look to the sophisticated woman in clingy fabrics. "Just after the war, their dads weren't there, and many mums felt they had to impose the same discipline on their daughters that fathers would normally have done."
Barbara Hulanicki's five Culture Shifters
Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina (1954) She's always been a huge heroine of mine, with her fresh, personal take on make-up and simple pearl earrings.
Together with the Biba silhouette – ‘as long as possible… like a drawing’ – they told a story that was new to post-war fashion.
Up to the 1950s the French were the rule-makers and the British rule-takers; by the 1960s we had become the rule-breakers. At the fair end of the range, liquid make-up was based on a chalky pale yellow, fixed with near-white or translucent powder.
Inside it was full of moody pictures taken by photographers like Helmut Newton.
In 1968, after tuition fees, books and lodgings had been paid for, I blew my university grant quite shamelessly on Biba clothes featured there. In fact I can summon a mental inventory of all the items of clothing I bought from Biba over its short life, from the lilac fit-and-flare mini-coat that was my first proud purchase in 1967 to the brown maxi-coat with the power shoulders and the shaggy fake-fur trim that was my last in 1972.
Now she designs especially for newspapers and magazines on a mail-order only basis. What this high-minded family man made of these waftings from the casbah at nine-o'clock on a Monday morning when he was trying to discuss 'the rise of the novel' I now blush to think.
Certainly, as one contributor to the Newcastle Biba show wrote of the rather overpowering effect of Biba cosmetics in broad daylight: 'We thought we were the bee's knees but the lads thought we were ghouls.'
In 1972, after moving to London, I caught up with the new Biba department store in the old Derry & Toms building on Kensington High Street.
It was a shopping experience that answered the needs of a young generation enthusiastic for fashion, for the shock of the new.
When the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle decided 15 months ago to stage a retrospective on Biba, fashion store for Sixties swingers, the organisers launched a nationwide 'Bring Out Your Biba' campaign, to encourage former customers to search through their cupboards.