ABSTRACT
While investigating fashion retailing in the mid twentieth century, I came across the catalogue for an exhibition held in 1993, entitled Biba: The Label, the Lifestyle, the Look.1 Biba was a small, offbeat and romantic fashion boutique that by 1973 had expanded to fill an entire redundant department store on Kensington High Street in West London. Its owner, Barbara Hulanicki, brilliantly marketed clothing, accessories, home furnishings and even food in a coherently designed manner, used a palette of subtle colours and evoked particular historical moods with moments of exoticism. Biba’s initially inadvertent success seemed to epitomize the waxing and waning of the popular ‘swinging sixties’ fashion movement. The exhibition catalogue proposed that ‘Biba was the blueprint for the whole concept of the designer lifestyle, and the idea that it was possible to re-create an entire way of living, courtesy of the store.’2
