THE LEGENDARY DESIGNER WHO FOUNDED BIBA BARBARA HULANICKI ON SHAPING THE SIXTIES AND DRESSING ITS BIGGEST STARS

Barbara Hulanicki, the fashion legendary store Biba, is remembering one of her first and most loyal customers.

"I used to see this beautiful girl who looked just like Greta Garbo," she tells HELLO!, speaking from her home near South Beach in Miami Beach. "She didn't have much make-up on. And she just stood there, watching for hours.

I'd think: 'What is she doing?" She was still in school but was interested in fashion and making her own clothes." That girl was Twiggy, whose association with the boutique helped her become one of the most famous models of the 1960s, and who remains one of Barbara's closest friends.

FAMOUS FANS

She was just one of the countless celebrities film stars, rock gods and models-who'd happily queue around the block, along with office girls and teenagers, to gain entry to a fantasy world of opulence and glamour.

If anything embodied the cutting-edge, fashion-forward and cool zeitgeist of the late 1960s and the 1970s, it was the Biba store.

Now the fascinating story behind the brand and its fashions is told in an exhibition at London's Fashion and Textile Museum.

The Biba Story, 1964-1975 takes visitors from its modest beginnings as a mail-order catalogue, via three shops to its final home in Big Biba, a seven-floor department store in Kensington that sold homeware and make-up as well as clothes.

There was even a creche and a rooftop garden with flamingos.

More film set than shop floor, the art deco-inspired decor included sofas for shoppers' boyfriends to sit on while they waited and fringed lampshades, ostrich feathers and tinted mirrors.

In communal changing rooms Customers would try on the floppy hats and feather boas, leopard-print coats and patterned maxi dresses, trouser suits and sequinned bodices that defined the Biba look.

The lighting was low and the music loud.