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Biba founder Barbara Hulanicki would get on with Dizzee Rascal – both have a fondness for the word “bonkers”. Speaking from her Miami base on the 50th anniversary of the 60s label, Hulanicki uses it first to describe how she feels about Biba reaching the grand old age of 50, and second on the prices the original pieces now raise with collectors around the world. “The prices make me giggle,” says Hulanicki. “We would sell stuff for the equivalent of $5 or $6.”
Biba’s success began in 1964 when Hulanicki and her husband Stephen Fitz-Simon launched a gingham frock called the Barbara. Featured in the Daily Mirror and priced at 25 shillings (around £23 in today’s money), it was affordable and cool, a combination that appealed to an emerging demographic of style-hungry young women who didn’t want to dress like their mothers. Biba sold 17,000 of them and grew to be the centre of cool London, opening a big store in Kensington in 1966. Hulanicki remembers visiting the space with Fitz-Simon and their son Witold. “We heard it was going to be wrecked and went along to see it,” she says. “I said we had to get it, and Fitz fixed it up. He knew when I felt strongly about something that it was the golden egg.”
Hulanicki says that the years that followed were the best of Biba. “We were making everything in-store, responding to what was popular and making our own fabrics,” she remembers. “We must have made three million garments over lots and lots of designs. You know what’s selling so you can make more, or make ones from a similar pattern. It was like fast fashion but faster.” She believes this simplicity is the secret to the brand’s staying power. “People can understand it,” she says. “These clothes follow the line of the female body.” Although that body has changed somewhat. “Everyone was thin. We tried to make a size 12, but no one bought it,” says Hulanicki. “The clothes were mostly a six or an eight. Hips only came in with the pill.”
To celebrate the brand reaching its half-century, the V&A has produced a book, The Biba Years 1963-1975, and the shopping site Farfetch has collaborated with LA vintage store Decades to sell a collection of vintage Biba, with all clothes dating from about 1969 to the early 70s – widely regarded as the golden era of the store. Cameron Silver, the founder of Decades, describes the collection of 100 pieces – which includes blouses, short dresses and the long, leopard-print frock worn by Twiggy in Vogue in 1973 – as “one of the highlights of my vintage-obsessed career so far”, and thinks the clothes may “be purchased by designers as reference points”. Farfetch founder Jose Neves, meanwhile, says: “Biba has been an iconic part of British fashion and is still very relevant today. We’re excited to see how the next generation adopts the collection.”
Now in her late 70s, Hulanicki has also had a successful career as an interiors designer in Miami, and produced sell-out collections for Topshop and Asda. She shows no sign of tiring of talking about what must now feel a lifetime ago. “People will come up to me in the street and tell me about the pieces in their attic,” she says. “And I’ll know how many buttons it has, that much detail. I know every single one of the garments.”
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