Big Biba & Ruby Keeler

 Cathy Lomax is swept up by the 1970s visions of Hollywood glamour at 'The Biba Story' and 'Do a Ruby Keeler' at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. 

 

Biba, the name rolls across the tongue, evoking images of sumptuous fabrics, peacock feathers and impossibly glamorous women. I feel sad that I didn’t get to visit Big Biba in the 1970s. This glorious shop, a temple of style and cool, which was open for only a relatively short period, was situated in a stylish art deco building that had previously been department store Derry and Toms on Kensington High Street. So, I was excited to see the exhibition devoted to Biba at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. 

Biba, a clothing brand designed by Barbara Hulanicki, may only have been extant between 1964 and 1975, but its influence, and most importantly the clothes, were iconic. The label is evocative, and continues to be familiar to a new generation from shared images and features about the time when London was swinging. The Biba look, as epitomised by house model Ingrid Boulting, was long thin arms, flat chest, low waist and straight hips. For Hulanicki 'Ingrid was the perfect shape. The idea was that one was trying to get that shape on to people who weren't that shape'. (It is notable that Biba clothes are very tiny, maybe post-war women who had grown up under food rationing were predominantly a different shape from our current more healthily round average shape?) Archetypal Biba clothes have regulation puffed shoulders and are made from tactile velvets and jerseys with sprinkles of sequins. Prints are also plentiful and feature stylised art deco shapes, while colours are brown and mauve and rust and plum and forest green, or what Hulanicki calls, ‘Auntie colours’, after her inspirational Aunt Sophie. 

 

The exhibition opens with an enlarged image of a feature about 'career women' in the Daily Mirror, for which Hulinicki supplied a little gingham dress (inspired by one Brigitte Bardot wore and recreated for the exhibition), which resulted in thousands of orders and initiated Hulanicki’s mail order business. This leads to a corridor of naked women holding up circular glass shades – art deco style lamps that were familiar items in Bib Biba. Deco is the leitmotif of the Biba style (or maybe more accurately what might now be termed the less time-period restricted Hollywood Regency style). 

Leopard print acrylic fun fur coat, 1973, on loan from Lilli Anderson

The atmospheric runway leads into the darkened first room which is peopled by Biba clad mannequins wearing a myriad of outfits in the house colours. A particularly striking group features a nipped waist trouser suit and oversize coat in animal print against a large image of a glamourous 1970s Twiggy sitting all alone in the Big Biba restaurant. The caption tells us that Biba produced some of the best and least expensive fake-fur fashions for men and women and accessories to furnish the home.

And this is important because the Big Biba shop was a department store which alongside the iconic fashion, sold furnishings, wallpapers, makeup and even food – all in the distinctive Biba style. The Biba makeup line, which was vital to create  the Biba look of smoky eyes, long enhanced lashes, dark lips and primary coloured nails, was so popular that it outlasted the rest of the empire and was sold across the world. 

Looks available by mail order from Biba catalogue, 1968.
Illustrated models sport the Biba makeup look

 

The Biba style reflects the revival of 1940s fashion in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yves Saint Laurent presented a 40s-inspired collection in 1971, but it was Biba who created the best high street examples (although Biba, magpie-like, borrowed from all the decades of the first half of the 20th century). And this is important, Biba was not haute couture; it was accessible and within the price range of young women who were exercising their liberation from the corseted constraints of 1950s fashion. This means that although the clothes were way beyond the fast throw-away fashion seen today they were not necessarily built to last. This is apparent in the clothes on display which do not hang from the dress forms like cossetted high fashion – these clothes have been worn, loved and re-worn. This is apparent in the list of names that the items on display have been borrowed from, which rather than big institutions and collections are dominated by individual women, who I like to think have loved and cherished their favourite items of Biba. Despite this everywoman quality Biba and Hulanicki did not shirk on design, and this is reflected in the stylish catalogues produced from 1968-69 which were photographed by names such as Helmet Newton.

Black waistcoat suit unlined, in heavy linen texture rayon cream linen collar and cuffs. Cream buttons; flared skirt, 

April 1968, on loan from Annie Hawker

 

Alongside the Biba show don’t miss the gloriously titled Do a Ruby Keeler, a small exhibit devoted to Shirley Russell’s designs for the 1971 Ken Russell film The Boyfriend. Packed with archival items it reinforces the link between the early 1970s and the high style of classical Hollywood. Russell was especially influenced by the the films of Busby Berkley (which often starred actress Ruby Keeler) and was a pioneer in her use of vintage clothing, which she also sold through her shop The Last Picture Frock in Notting Hill.

 

This exciting period in British fashion could be seen as being compromised by its overwhelming nostalgia for a past glamorous period. Nostalgia is an interesting term which is currently attached to a denial of contemporary mores, often in a reactionary way. But Biba’s nostalgia was a way of denying the consumerist and conservative 1950s by looking back to the fantasy emanated by a disappeared Hollywood glamour. It is fascinating that it is now Biba that inspires a nostalgia for its own particular egalitarian glamour as well as, I would suggest, a less commercially cynical period of young fashion.

 

The Biba Story, 1964-1975 and Do a Ruby Keeler

Fashion and Textile Museum, 83 Bermondsey Street, London SE1

Until 8 September 2024

Amanda Ziemele, the Latvian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale

Embracing the performative possibilities of oil and canvas, Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale provides Toby Üpson with a romantic escape from all that is overwrought and excessive. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

The early mornings in Venice are bright. Lullabies of white noise. From April 17 to 19 — the preview days of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia , titled Foreigners Everywhere — the sun rose between 06:21 and 06:25. At 06:30, or thereabouts, I sat, perched on the balcony of my rented room, eating muesli from a chipped bowl, watching the sun’s rays calmly tip-tap over the copper clad roof of Campanile di San Marco. A dreamy experience, a sense of which I would like to recall with you now: 

Imagine, we are meandering through Venice’s narrow streets. It is bright and white and there is not another soul about — an anomaly for this busy city. We shimmy down a walkway-come-catacomb emerging into a sun filled square. It's a magnificent reprieve, like the taste of fresh air. With nobody about, here a sense of liveliness is provided by loose sheets of cotton delicately hung from homely windows, by loose leaves and/or petals drifting from a sole magnolia tree, by loose fly-posters, worn and weathered and weary from life, juddering off the available walls. There is a bench at the centre of this scene. Held by the mystique of this quiet place we waltz towards this. Reclining, we glance left, we glance right, up and down spotting a battered hardback lying on the ground, its title indiscernible. Thumbing spine, cover and back we open the book at random. No narrative arrives, its old pages just rivulets of smoke grey. Following the flow of these never-lines, we get lost in hospitable thinking, in the transcendence found in pure form. That is, here, basking in the spring’s morning sun, we dream with and through the abstract and anomalous, with and through the beauty which composes this encounter. It is all Romantic sublime, like a literary text, a moment that leads us beyond turgid social life. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

‘O day and night, but this is wondrous strange... and therefore as a stranger give it welcome’, lines of Shakespearean dialogue, reshaped by Edwin A Abbott in his 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, set the tone and title for Amanda Ziemele’s Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Representing Latvia, her large, three-dimensional paintings subtly sit about the Pavilion — much like those loose sheets, loose leaves and loose fly-posters enlivening my dreamt-up square above — creating a welcoming zone within the bluster of the Biennale and its opening week. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Ziemele’s paintings are fun, fleshy gestures floating in space. With their skeletal stretchers exposed for all to see, they not only defy any known geometry, be this spatial or shapely, but wave a disregarding hand towards notions that treat painting as a flat pictorial means. Here paintings twist and contort, they wink, blink, rise and fall or simply dance about the Pavilion. Honest and overtly self-conscious, the abstract simplicity of these forms reminds me of the blockade lines and loops which constitute the text-based work of Lawrence Weiner. That is, much like his unashamed text on walls Ziemele’s artworks are what they are: sculptural paintings, suggestive and protean. Indeed, as Ziemele’s folds of formless colour — cheeky blue, bright orange, green, terracotta, pearl, and Ikea teal — dot the walls, the ceiling and the floor of the Pavilion, gleaming in the Venetian light, they speak softly through the impasto of their brushstroke veins, lulling us to pause, to think and explore all the possible reaches found through their multi-dimensionality. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

This oil and canvas allusiveness is poetic. With each painting working out from itself, they do not dictate a thought, rather each invites us to take flight from the noise of our imminent context — for me, the Biennale and its overly mediated foregrounding of ‘hot’ politics. To make another comparison, as I look upon the wall-mounted painting Double Crisp (2024), two Pringles-like petal curves of taupe pearl positioned aside one of the Pavilion’s gridded windows, I am reminded of the ineffable magic found in Emily Dickinson’s transcendentalist poem Two Butterflies went out at Noon — an ambiguous 12 lines, formally self-conscious, dashed through with disinterested joy — a dreamy construction, one critical of a social climate yet with a waltzing lightness that creates an affinity across readers. This is a tone I appreciate. It is one that avoids the political pageantry that undermines much of what I encountered at the Biennale, and here, as the Pavilion’s title suggests, it is a tone which welcomes the wondrous stranger, providing a generous space to rest and think and meet and shelter together. To riff, there are foreigners everywhere and Ziemele’s Pavilion is a place to host us all, no aestheticized labels attached.

 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Not knowing about Ziemele’s practice before being welcomed into the Pavilion, I did some Googling. Most of Ziemele’s works emerge from a place of site-specificity, or in dialogue with specific situations. In previous projects, such as Sun Has Teeth — an exhibition at the Latvian National Museum of Art, 2023 — her large canvas blobs drifted amongst the whitewashed woodwork of the museum’s attic exhibition space. Like mesmerising butterflies or clouds of pastel colour, the works in that exhibition rested weightlessly in the air of the museum, not only inviting viewers to look differently about the place but reanimating the quotidian structure of the museum’s ceiling. 

 

Departing from the flat forms seen in her previous exhibitions, Ziemele’s Pavilion feels artistically ambitious. Collaborating with the architect Niklāvs Paegle to establish a spatial choreography that echos the physicality of the Pavilion, most notably seen in the visual relationship between the Pavillion’s large gable window and the supports for each canvas, here Ziemele uses both oil and canvas gesturally to create an animate zone, or a ‘living organism’ to quote the press release. This exhibitionary choreography does not feel like a meek transformative imposition. Rather each of Ziemele’s loose forms accentuates the agency already structurally woven into the architecture of the Pavilion allowing the very frames of this otherwise bare cube to resound, becoming an active part of the exhibition’s being. To get all meta for a moment, by working with and from the formal space of the Pavilion, the totality of Ziemele’s presentation can be seen as a fractal projection her individual paintings; with its structural body newly animated, the space twists and contorts, tip-tapping with colour, dancing differently under the Venetian sun. 

Detail view: Amanda Ziemele, Morning Sunshine (Pottering Along), 2024, oil on canvas. Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Situated at the heart of the Arsenale’s long march of National Pavilions, Ziemele’s brushstroke architectures offer us a reprieve from the excessive curation and gluttony of the busy Biennale. Like an anthology of poems, read on a bright spring morning, complete in itself or imparting pleasure through its parts, the Pavilion does not demand overwrought readings, it welcomes momentary sojourns, be these contextually critical or just affinitive, in the most hospitable manner.

 

The Venice Biennale is open until Sunday 24 November 2024