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source: nytimes.com
December 8, 2005
A 60's Crush Lingers in Minds and Designs
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
"Biba: The Biba Experience," by Alwyn W. Turner, recounts the shop's heyday and mystique.
By RUTH LA FERLA
MICHELLE BRAVERMAN remembers strolling down Madison Avenue on a wintry day in the early 1970's. She was all done up in a maxicoat and a cloche she had bought at Biba in London when she spied a slender figure approaching. The woman was trim and pretty, Ms. Braverman recalled, "and she could not take her eyes off my hat."
"She was Ali MacGraw, and she was with Bob Evans. You don't forget things like that. And you don't forget Biba."
Firstview
In the last year, designers have imitated the Biba look, including Burberry Prorsum.
Ms. Braverman, a 63-year-old Houstonian, is one in a legion of style-besotted women of her generation for whom the name Biba, the fabled London shop, evokes a nimbus of glamour and decadence that was London in the waning years of the 60's and early 70's. It was an era when most young women with a purchase on cool wore, or simply longed to own, the languidly romantic designs of Biba's founder, Barbara Hulanicki, whose dimly lighted store on Abingdon Road reigned as the undisputed world headquarters of chic.
In the last year or so, Ms. Braverman's passion for Ms. Hulanicki's wine-stained colors, wispy fabrics, Art Nouveau- and Art Deco-inflected prints, sinuous shapes and discernibly louche aesthetic has infected a new generation: collectors, artists and designers intent on resurrecting the moody Biba style.
"It's a Biba moment," said Karin Bereson, a celebrity stylist and an owner of No. 6, an outpost of cutting-edge style in downtown Manhattan. Ms. Bereson said she sees the influence of Biba wherever she turns. There are the 30's-inspired geometric prints; romantic floral patterns in moody tones of purple, claret and teal; the girlish, body-skimming shapes, some reminiscent of flappers; and all, to Ms. Bereson's selective eye, "looking fresh and new and subtly styled, as opposed to just pretty, sexy or loud."
The first rumblings of a new Biba invasion could be discerned on the runways last spring. Miuccia Prada introduced a succession of floral-patterned velvet dresses in a Biba palette of deep wine and blue. By October John Galliano was vibrating to Biba, too, sending out on the catwalk a sultry blond model with crimson lips and smoke-ringed eyes, a ringer for Twiggy as captured in a onetime Biba cosmetics campaign.
Today the string of designers touched with Biba fever includes Alice Temperley, whose spring collection includes 60's-style dresses with bell sleeves and raised waistlines; Phoebe Philo of Chloé, whose high-neck tea dresses and diaphanous Empire-waist frocks riff on the Biba of the early 70's; and Christopher Bailey of Burberry, who showed a 30's-style wrap dress accessorized with an old-fashioned cloche. Original Biba dresses, in demand at vintage stores, command anywhere from $300 to $1,000.
Recently Jo Wood, a designer of organic beauty products and the wife of Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, borrowed the black and gold palette that is the Biba fashion signature for the packaging of a new bath and body line, Jo Wood Organics, which arrives in stores this month.
"My brief to the packaging designers was, 'Be Biba-esque,' " Ms. Wood told The New York Times last week, referring to the Art Deco logo splashed on every Biba shopping bag and fragrance bottle in the shop's glory days.
By the early 70's Biba had grown from a tiny West London boutique to a cavernous theme park of a department store. Arguably the world's first lifestyle emporium, the store showcased apparel alongside similarly themed and packaged bed linens, laundry soaps and even pet food, all the while remaining faithful to the personal vision of its founder.
For Americans the store's studiously old-fashioned décor, all Victorian hat stands and wallpaper, simultaneously conjured the era of London music halls and the silent films of Hollywood and figured tellingly in the Biba mystique. As did Biba's very inaccessibility.
England and the relentlessly documented London youthquake of the 60's "seemed so cool at the time," the New York designer Anna Sui recalled. "You thought, 'London has the Beatles, they have Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, they have the Stones, they have Biba.' You thought, 'Oh my god, I've never seen anything like this.' "
In his book "Biba: The Biba Experience," a coffee-table history published in London last year, Alwyn W. Turner isolated the factors that made Biba such a magnet.
"What Biba was helping to create," he wrote, "was the concept of shopping as an experience, a leisure activity for the young." For the first time shopping broke away from the 50's pattern, Mr. Turner pointed out. "It was no longer something that a girl did reluctantly with her mother. It was a social event in its own right to be shared with peers."
Biba devotees appeared to share Ms. Hulanicki's democratic vision. "My whole thing was I loved disposable, affordable clothes," Ms. Hulanicki said this week. "It always made me terribly happy to see a girl with £200 worth of clothing in their shopping bags - enough to fill their closets without feeling guilty."
Bergdorf Goodman was among the first American retailers to attempt to cash in on the craze, opening the first Biba shop-within-a-shop in 1971. The boutique was stocked with emblematic Biba products, including raincoats, T-shirts and lipsticks that emulated the venom-drenched shades worn by Hollywood's legendary screen sirens. As photographed by Sarah Moon, the typical Biba girl had the pallor of a Dresden doll, her chalkiness underlined by delicate rosy cheeks and inky lips.
"It wasn't a romantic look," Ms. Moon, who shot many of the store's signature campaigns, told The Times of London this fall. "It was more poisoned than that."
TO Ms. Sui, the Bergdorf Biba counter was a magical Aladdin's cave. "I used to come into New York from Michigan every summer," she recalled, "and I looked forward to the colors, the plums and teals and maroons that were murkier and more exciting than any color you had ever seen." Ms. Sui's current resort collection, which reaches stores this month, bears many Biba hallmarks - among them, the decadent palette, the gossamer fabrics and a dizzying whorl of paisleys. "You can see it really influenced me," she said.
Fittingly, Bergdorf will be among the first American stores to carry new Biba-inspired cosmetics and fashions, including Ms. Woods's line and a collection of shoes from Michael Pearce in London, who recently secured the rights to the Biba name and who plans to introduce a Biba ready-to-wear collection, designed by Bella Freud, for fall.
Such wares seem conceived to tap a bottomless well of nostalgia. "To a younger generation of British designers like Stella and Christopher Bailey of Burberry, Biba and the 60's have become history," said Andrew Bolton, the associate curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "What they are doing now references the 60's, and, through Barbara's eye, Victorian England, Art Nouveau and the 20's, 30's and 40's, and is consistent with the new romanticism dominating fashion now."
Nor does it hurt that the reigning pop stars of the day shopped at Biba, a gilded cohort that included Brigitte Bardot; Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull; Sonny and Cher; Julie Christie, who wore a Biba wardrobe in "Darling," John Schlesinger's cautionary 60's film about the London style set; and, not least, Anita Pallenberg, the honey-skinned consort to Keith Richards.
In Mr. Bolton's words, designers who embrace the Hulanicki aesthetic today aspire to dress "the cool, the hip, the young, the Anita Pallenbergs of the 21st century."
In an interview, Mr. Turner said he is routinely reminded of the shop's allure. "Young people studying fashion e-mail me several times a day, pleading, 'Can you tell me about Biba?' " he said.
Paradoxically the era those fans pine for was plagued by economic woes. In those days, Mr. Turner said, London was headed for a serious recession, and people feared a replay of the Depression. "Often you would go to the shops in the late afternoon and find that there was no electricity and that the stores were lighted by candles," he said. "Still there is the feeling that actually life was better in those days, despite the worries, despite the blackouts."
Which may explain why, as Ms. Sui observed, "we can't seem to let go of that era."
Ms. Braverman, the Biba-clad Houstonian, can relate. She now works as a sales assistant at Anthropologie, which carries fashions subtly influenced by Biba. This week she is set on acquiring a black velvet Anthropologie jacket that is short and tight through the ribs with sleeves "very long and Bibalike - kind of naughty Victorian."
"Even now, I keep on trying to buy Biba," she said.
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