Biba

Biba was a London boutique and name given to a trendy style of clothing linked to the British avant-guard of the 1960s. Biba is the name of the sister of designer Barbara Hulanicki (1936), who thought about this name when, together with her husband Stephen Fitz-Simon, she started a mail order business in 1963. It sold skirts and other items of clothing, and launched the Biba Postal Boutique through advertisements in the Daily Express. It was again with the Biba name that, in 1964, at the height of swinging London, she opened her first shop in Kensington. The shop offered a window for a new style created for the young people of the time, made of clothes which showed the shape of the body and stressed the physical type dominant at the time, that of the top model Twiggy. The daughter of Polish Jews who emigrated to Palestine before the war, at the age of 22 she moved to England and studied at the Brighton School of Art. In 1955 she won a competition for beachwear designs advertised by the Evening Standard newspaper. Encouraged by that adventure, she left college in order to work as a fashion illustrator for Vogue and for Tatler, and then on the London editorial staff of Women’s Wear Daily. Thanks to these experiences, she decided to make her début as a designer. Her style is characterized by great attention to everything that goes on around her, from a youthful desire to break the rules of bourgeois style to a look back at the fashions of the 1930s, with some nostalgia. Her styles (maxi and mini-skirts, bikinis with matching blouses, overcoats in velvet or in shiny and colored PVC) have great success, partly because of their low prices. A period of decline begins in the second half of the 1970s.
Barbara moves to Brazil. The shop, run by her husband, closes shortly after.
After the death of Fitz-Simon, the designer moves to Miami, where she creates architecture for hotels in a tropical-deco style. She did the restyling of various prestigious hotels in South Beach, including The Marlin.
The myth of Biba is today kept alive by the new London shops clearly inspired by it, by very frequent exhibits in the most important British museums, and by the passion of fans who seek out the work and any memorabilia from the firm’s golden age. The second episode of the BBC documentary Designing the Decades, dedicated to British fashion, celebrates the art of Biba along with Clive Sinclair, Charles Hall, Roy Jacuzzi and Malcom McLaren.