Get the London look

Exuberant and different, Biba helped consign to history the fustiness of post-war dressing. Matthew Dennison looks at the rise and fall of the iconic 1960s fashion label

LOOK again. Beyond the black and pink ostrich feathers, massed in glass vases, are chocolate-coloured lipsticks, reflected in 1,000 mirrors. There are baked beans in customised cans and biscuits in patterned paper bags and the walls are papered with leopard prints. Potted palms thrust arching stems towards the light, the scent of Madonna lilies merges with the body odour and bubblegum of the communal changing areas. Is the floor pink marble? If you want false eyelashes, the owner has ordered 25,000 pairs. There are black nappies, too, scarcely visible in the carefully dim lighting, glossy black coffee cups and, draped over bentwood stands, strings and strings of beads alongside feather boas in the dusty, watercolour hues of old women’s knickers. On a sofa in the window, benign beyond the fray, a priest is eating a sandwich for lunch. ‘It isn’t just selling dresses, it’s a whole way of life,’ explains the creative force behind this tantalising melange.

For a gorgeous decade, beginning in 1964, clothing and lifestyle brand Biba, now the subject of an exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London SE1, revolutionised affordable shopping in the capital. ‘I wanted to do something different, to make beautiful clothes,’ founder Barbara Hulanicki has explained. And so she did, her distinctive vision shaped by her own perennial desire to rebel, the pale faces and dark lips of the pre-Raphaelite muses that she had admired in galleries, Audrey Hepburn dressed by Givenchy and the glamorous neverland of interwar Hollywood.