Barbara Hulanicki: From A to Biba and back again

It's 40 years since Barbara Hulanicki started the label that transformed Britain's drab fashion scene. In a rare interview, she talks to Alix Sharkey

Andy Warhol was right. We live in an age of instant fame, where anyone can become a household name overnight. Even if you're not famous, you can behave as if you were. Dozens of glossy celebrity-driven magazines urge us to imitate the lifestyle, informing us where and how the stars live, eat, drink, shop, holiday, dress, and work out. An internet trawl will tell you within minutes what kind of mobile phone, trainers, watch or prescription drugs your favourite celebrity prefers.

But if you lived in the provinces in the early 1970s - Essex, for example - London's glamorous demi-monde of models, pop stars, fashion designers and photographers was impossibly remote and inaccessible. Back then, stardom was a priesthood: only the initiated could participate. The rest of us strained for glimpses of glamour on our TVs and in our dreary, monochromatic press; we tried desperately to decipher clues in the photos and reviews of a condescending pop press.

Then everything changed. In 1973, a temple of pop culture opened on Kensington High Street, and suddenly the masses had an insight into the cool lifestyle of the capital's ultra-hip. Better still, we could rub shoulders with them, because this cathedral of cool was so magnificent that even the Brahmins of the pop-star caste frequented it. We could buy the same clothes, cosmetics and fragrances, drink at the same juice bar, dine or dance or watch the same bands playing in the same ballroom, even take home the same soap powder. The temple was called Biba.

We had never seen its like. Six storeys of Deco-inspired glamour, swathed in silk and satin, the walls painted black, plum and chocolate brown, with mirrored pillars and faux Tiffany lamps, ostrich plumes, peacock feathers and chrome fittings. Ten thousand feet of breathtaking opulence, the first fully developed lifestyle boutique, selling a retro-modernist vision of late-capitalist splendour two decades before anyone would fully comprehend the concept.

For glamour-starved provincials, Biba was a garden of earthly delights.

I would play truant to go and lounge on enormous plush sofas in the ground-floor windows, casually ignoring dumbstruck passers-by, or watching vampy girls with pencil skirts and racoon eyes stealing lipstick from the make-up counter. Upstairs, I even saw a guy steal a suit, just put it on and walk out of the store. There was a lot of shoplifting, though I never indulged. For me it would have been sacrilegious. And who would risk being caught red-handed in front of their idol? Occasionally, Brian Eno or Freddie Mercury would stroll past, or some foxy woman whose New York accent and peroxide haircut marked her out as part of Bowie's latest clique.

"It was our version of Deco," says Barbara Hulanicki, who launched Biba with her late husband Stephen Fitzsimon. "More decadent, less reverential. We took the style and gave it a nightclub-oriented feel. So it was very dark and very sexy." Now living in Miami Beach, Hulanicki chuckles as she looks out at the ocean and recalls that distant era.

"The clothes manufacturers - the copyists who would try and steal our ideas - would come to the store and sit outside in their cars, shaking their heads, saying, 'Why the fuck are all those pretty girls going into that horrible dark hole?'"

Ah, the Biba style. At that point, surely it was a reaction against the slovenly style of late hippiedom and psychedelia? "Well, Carnaby f Street and the hippie thing were mainly geared to male clothing, and the women were just an afterthought. But Biba was about girls' stuff, the style revolved around the look of screen goddesses of the 1930s and 1940s. So even our menswear complemented that look. But mainly we just did our own thing," says Hulanicki. "Back then, everybody did their own thing, it was just accepted."

Born in Poland, raised in Jerusalem, Hulanicki started doing her own thing shortly after arriving in England from Palestine, where her father was the Polish Consular General. When Palestine became Israel in 1948, she was sent to live with her Aunt Sophie in Brighton. An eccentric aesthete, Aunt Sophie was to have a huge influence - but only after an intimidated Barbara had left Brighton Art College and flown the nest.

"Oh, she was wild," says Barbara. "She thought [Jean] Harlow and Dietrich and these people were all very vulgar, and that she had a far better take on female glamour. She was incredible. She dressed in all these flowing, satin 1930s things and wore turbans. At six o'clock she'd be changing into her tea gowns, and in the evening out came the jewels from the safe in order to dress for dinner. But she felt children should be seen and not heard. For me, growing up as a girl of 14, I was revolted, I hated it. But the minute I was free, I went back to it, of course. It all seemed very different, far more alluring."

After college Hulanicki became a successful freelance fashion illustrator, covering the Paris shows for Women's Wear Daily, Vogue, the Times and the Observer. It was during this period that she met a dashing Irish advertising executive called Stephen Fitzsimon. "Fitz", as he was known, urged her to start designing her own clothes. In 1964 they founded a small mail-order business together in the back room of their Cromwell Road flat in west London, and called it Biba. Friends told them they were mad, that fashion would never sell by post, but the couple, who believed high-street fashion was overpriced, felt there was a gap in the market. Through Hulanicki's connections, they slowly managed to get their wares mentioned on the fashion pages of the daily papers.

"We couldn't afford advertising. We'd had orders that were around 200, 150, but it wasn't big enough for proper production." Then the country's most influential fashion editor, the Mirror's Felicity Green, told them she'd write about one of their outfits, a little gingham dress with a matching headscarf, which sold for just under £3.

"We thought we'd get two inches, and it was a whole page. The order on that outfit ran to 17,000. Our room, the saucepans, the kitchen drawers, everything was full of postal orders. It took over our lives - great fun, but exhausting. And it gave us an in with the manufacturers, and of course then we were taken seriously."

Their success led to the first Biba boutique, in a former chemist's shop in Abingdon Road, in a run-down Kensington. By 1973, having outgrown two more premises, Biba had metamorphosed into the six-storey Art Deco department store with its own restaurant, the celebrated Rainbow Rooms dancehall, and a roof garden overlooking the High Street. The new store became a hangout for artists, film stars and rock musicians, and soon Mick Jagger, the Faces, David Bowie and Marianne Faithfull were among its regular customers. It sold much more than clothes and cosmetics - Biba baked beans, cereals and soap flakes were just a few of the items on the shelves. Meanwhile, Biba cosmetics were being sold in 33 countries across the globe. "We had 200,000 people coming through the door every week; tourists from America, France, Italy, Germany, even Brazil. It was the second-most-visited venue in the UK after the Tower of London." It was legendary, I tell her.

"Well, it was quite adventurous at the time," she says, with typical understatement. "See, we understood the importance of own-labels and logos, but the investors didn't. Because we were selling a lifestyle before people really understood what that meant." That decision, she says, was prompted by the sheer disappointment of shopping in 1970s England. "Everything else was so horrible. Bad products, poor packaging, ghastly shops, bad service. There was no picking or choosing. And you couldn't get black clothes. Clothes for girls came in revolting beige, royal blue, red and a horrible brown. That was it. So naturally, when we started selling black dresses or dark plum or chocolate brown skirts, girls loved them. And we were already growing older, buying homes and having children, so we wanted decent household items and furnishings. So whatever we wanted, we'd just put in the store, like the children's department."

It must have been such a thrill, launching the first pop-culture department store. "Well, it was very nice because I was doing it for the first time around. And it was precarious, we were taking a big risk, so it was great. But there was a feeling that we were part of a new scene. You see, they all grew up together. The pop stars who came into the store, the regular f customers, the girls who worked in the shop and had been with us since Abingdon Road, almost 10 years earlier, they'd all grown up together through Ready Steady Go. We would go there on Friday nights after we'd closed the store, and so they knew the pop stars as friends. And also, pop stars would come into the store to pick up the girls, because they were so beautiful and dressed so stylishly. Everybody looked amazing back then. So skinny and fabulous."

Were they much thinner? "Oh, terribly thin. It was a different diet. Much less meat. And it was before everybody started taking the Pill, which made women much rounder. So the girls then were still much leaner. I can remember walking down Kensington Church Street in about 1968, and seeing all those bums and thighs that weren't there before. The other thing was the hamburger. Wimpy had arrived by then, and people were suddenly eating more meat. Before that, the English ate very little meat. Very little cheese. When we first got to England in 1948 people were eating two ounces of cheese and one egg a week! It was all cabbage and potatoes. We were in shock! I'm amazed that people survived, really."

Biba finally closed its doors in 1976, a victim of corporate raiding before the term had been coined, but its influence had been far-reaching. Hulanicki continued to work in fashion, designing for Fiorucci and Cacharel, and launching a children's line for the Japanese market. In 1980, she returned to Britain from Brazil, launching a chain of boutiques and a cosmetics range under her own name. Why Brazil? She bursts into laughter: "Because we liked the sound of Carmen Miranda ... really, no other reason, it was that silly."

She missed the New Romantics and early hip hop, she says, because of her stint in South America. On her return, she was shocked by the fashions on London's streets. "I couldn't believe all these baggy, shapeless clothes. Huge, floppy shirts and things. And horrible shoes. It was a bit of a shock, because I'd missed a couple of episodes. I'd left the UK about the time that punks on the King's Road had started charging a fiver for tourist photos."

While doing various freelance design stints, Hulanicki contributed fashion photography to the Evening Standard and sketched Sarah Ferguson's wedding dress for the UK press.

Then, in 1987, she and Fitz moved to Miami Beach (they had often holidayed there in the late 1960s, awed by its Art Deco hotels), where she forged a new career as an architect and interior designer, and became instrumental in the revitalisation of South Beach's re-emerging Art Deco District. "Yes," she chuckles, "for some reason they seemed to think I knew what I was doing. And since nobody really knew what they were doing, I could pull it off."

Her first project was Woody's on the Beach, a trendy bar-restaurant for Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones. Models, pop stars and artists flocked to Woody's, and Hulanicki built quickly on her success, creating a series of wildly colourful and quirky restaurants and nightclub interiors, including Who's in the Grove, Sempers, Match Club and Bolero. Then she worked for Gloria and Emilio Estefan, designing their recording studios, their Cardozo Hotel and restaurant on Ocean Drive, and their private home on nearby Star Island.

Indeed, since 1990 Hulanicki has been perhaps the single most influential interior designer in Miami Beach, working on several high-profile hotels for Island Records founder Chris Blackwell (the man who signed Bob Marley and U2) and his Island Outpost hotel group. In 1993 she won an award from the American Institute of Architects for her work on the Netherlands Building (where she has her office, overlooking the beach) and another from the Association of Florida Architects.

Now in her late sixties, Hulanicki is as busy as ever, still designing hotels and interiors for wealthy clients, and girl fashions for B with G. Her most recent project was the ultra-hip Kent Hotel in Miami Beach, a stunning marriage of Art Deco with psychedelia and high-tech luxury.

But despite her fame in Miami for her architectural work, few locals have ever heard about Biba, and so she rarely discusses the past. Every now and again, however, a tipsy, middle-aged tourist will accost her at a party and tell her how much it meant to be admitted to her cathedral of cool in the monochrome mid-1970s. You must get it all the time, I tell her, fools like me coming up to you, saying, "Oh, I used to go to your store all the time!"

"No," she laughs. "What they say is, 'Oh, I used to steal tons of stuff from Biba.'"