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
No comments:
Post a Comment