Remembering Biba

After listening to Roxy Music with my great friend Erynn, I started to think about the swinging scene of London in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I went in search of iconic images that personify the transformational time in British pop culture and very quickly stumbled upon photos of the Biba store.

For anyone who is not familiar with Biba, I can say that it was the IT store of London from the day it openned it doors in 1965 on Kensington High Street until it ended in 1975. Biba was the creation of Barbara Hulanicki who not only designed the Biba clothing line, but was the first designer to create and sell a lifestyle. The Biba store was once called ” the most beautiful store in the world” by the Sunday times.  It was a place shop, but also offered a loungy vibe that encouraged visitors to stay and hang out.

Biba clothes were worn by everybody who was anybody and the store was frequented by all rock stars, movie stars and hipsters of the time including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Queen, Brigitte Bardot, Twiggy, Mia Farrow, etc.

The style of Biba went through a few distinct transformations, but the main themes were always the 1930s combined with  psychedelic, bohemian gypsy elements.

Here are a couple of examples from the late 1960s

This is a more glam rock look from the early 1970s

The Biba store was a place where the sales assistants were as beautiful as the clientele. In fact, the infamous Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue was at one time a Biba girl.

After the closing of the Biba store, Ms. Hulanicki and her husband moved to Brazil and today she resides in Miami.

It is hard for us to imagine how revolutionary the Biba store was at the time. The idea of stores selling a complete lifestyle and look is now very familiar to us. But I ask you to imagine this… imagine a world with only department stores and then, one day ,there is a store called Anthropologie. A store that not only sells products, but sells a whole idea about how we define ourselves aesthetically. That was Biba.

Would we flip for it? I think we would.