'Four girls prove that beauty and business ideas can go together'
A visit to the Biba exhibition at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh
In the summer of 1964, a small mail-order company called Biba released a pink gingham dress. They sold 17,000 of these dresses, which allowed Biba’s founder, Barbara Hulanicki, to give up her career as a fashion illustrator and devote herself full time to the creation of ‘one of the most influential and democratising’ fashion movements of the 60s and 70s.
Biba went from being a small boutique to a seven-storey department store with fifteen departments, each to a theme; including Victoriana, Pop Art, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. There was a beauty parlour, a roof garden tea room, and the 500-seat Rainbow Room restaurant which hosted musicians such as the New York Dolls, the Pointer Sisters and Liberace. Eventually Biba had ‘a children’s floor, a floor for men, a book store, a food market, and a “home” floor which sold items such as wallpaper, paint, cutlery, soft furnishings and even statues’, as well as cosmetics in every Dorothy Perkins store. It’s been called ‘the world’s first lifestyle label’.
I lived Biba as a teenager. Deep purple lip-gloss, smudgy dark green eye shadow, long hair, and a long green dress that I made from an Indian bedspread. You don’t realise that you’re in something extraordinary at the time, do you? We took the swirling multi-coloured patterns in the clothing in the shops for granted; the wildly fantastic album covers, the psychedelic posters on billboards advertising music festivals that highlighted hundreds of bands that went on to become legendary. I never stopped to think about the fact that everything was exploding visually from reports of the hallucinogenic experiences that people reported as they experimented with magic mushrooms and LSD. We scraped the insides out of banana skins, soaked morning glory seeds to get rid of their poison, tried anything that we had read might be a free way to get high.
When I stepped into the Biba exhibition, all of this started to move out from the shadows of long-forgotten parts of my mind.
Barbara Hulanicki took ideas from Art Nouveau, Victoriana, ‘silent movie dark smudged eyes’, and Art Deco. The Victoriana is interesting, at a time when, in architecture, Victorian buildings were being torn down and replaced with plain Modernist blocks and cubes. I never thought before about the idea that the crowded posters, swirling album covers and fabrics of the 60s/70s might have been an conscious or unconscious rejection of that fashion for unadorned white space, the preference for hard edges and straight lines.
Hulanicki’s drawings from her previous career as a fashion illustrator in the 1950s show a neat, restrained aesthetic, with plenty of sharp lines.
Within a few years though, she’d invented the Biba girl.
An exhibition text describes the Biba Look:
For Hulanicki the epitome of the look was the Biba house model (1969-73) Ingrid Boulting, ‘Ingrid was the perfect shape. The idea was that one was trying to get that shape onto people who weren’t that shape'.
Biba clothes reflected the Biba girl, from the early mini-dresses of the skinny Biba ‘Dolly Bird’, to the sexually alluring clothes of the Biba woman from 1970 onwards. Although the Biba silhouette changed, reflecting the evolution of fashion, the Biba look remained constant.
Biba was an enormous success and a huge cultural influence, but, despite a million visitors a week visiting Big Biba near the end, it suddenly collapsed due to the economic downturn of 1975:
Just as it seemed that nothing could affect this charmed existence, disaster struck and a bad mail order season turned a booming business into a financial disaster almost overnight.
…After disagreements with the British Land Board about creative control, Barbara Hulanicki left the company she had founded in 1975. Biba was closed soon afterwards by the British Land Company after it was decided that the Derry and Toms building was worth more than the ailing business itself.
You can read about what Barbara Hulanicki has been doing since here.
Dovecot studios are also showing a small number of fashion illustrations from the same period, unconnected to the Biba story.
I adore these drawings, such gorgeous free lines…
The Biba exhibition runs at Dovecot Studios until the 27th June, 2026
Dovecot studios is a tapestry studio which was originally a Victorian public baths and swimming pool. I used to swim there as a kid. It still feels slightly weird to look down from what used to be the viewing platform and remember its blue water…
The Rise and Fall of the Biba Boutique
Inside ‘Biba’: The iconic London store where Anna Wintour was a shop girl
Nicely done. I really enjoyed reading about Biba and looking at all of the images!
We had a boutique here once named Twiba, a homage by its owner to both Twiggy and Biba. It brought a style we hadn’t known existed to a rural Irish town at the time.