The Biba Story, 1964-1975: an enthralling return to the shop that defined the 60s

There is, and always has been, so much mythology around Biba, since its launch in 1964, that I’m no longer sure I ever really set foot inside the fashion label’s crowning glory, the seven-storey Art Deco building on Kensington High Street in which it gloriously resided for all of two years. I remember the store as eau de Nil, and bathed in a celestial golden light. (Not that I knew the words “eau de Nil” when I was 12. Or “celestial”.)

Apparently, in truth, it was black and dark – the perfect hang-out for David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, their various girlfriends, and the voracious shoplifters who were ultimately part of Biba’s undoing. How glorious it would have been if The Biba Story, 1964–75 could have recreated a corner of the emporium that Draper’s Record described as the most beautiful store in the world. Had this exhibition, at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey, been partially sponsored by a luxury company, as the Chanel, Alexander McQueen and Dior exhibitions at the V&A were, it might have. Here, things are a little rougher around the edges: but that’s more in the spirit of Biba.

Its founder was the charismatic and talented Barbara Hulanicki, a Polish émigrée (by way of Jerusalem) whose goal was to make sophisticated style accessible to those on a modest budget. Mary Quant, more or less her peer, was far pricier. This isn’t the kind of exhibition where you “ooh” and “aah” over the quality of the fabrics. Instead, Biba stood for creativity and exuberance. Its most recent equivalent would have been Top Shop in its Jane Shepherdson heydey, when the chain was working with designers such as Christopher Kane and its Oxford Circus flagship – in a last stand against the invasion of online shopping – was the place to be.

Where Hulanicki was less democratic was in sizing. Perhaps she didn’t need to be: she once noted that the British were wonderful to dress in the 1960s. because rationing meant they were all slim. I note that a wildly patterned size 10 shift dress in the exhibition would probably be classified as size 6 in today’s currency.

It’s quite a trip to see these outfits, all 70 of them, in such close proximity, and with no glass cases to distance us from them. Many are from private collections, and there are downloadable audio commentaries from some of their doting owners. You can see these clothes have been lived in and loved, although where required, some judicious conservation work has been magicked on them.

You can trace too, the shift from the psychedelic, slightly bonkers optimism of the late 1960s to the more sober colours, Regency lapels and raised-waist 1930s-inspired silhouettes of the recessionary, strike-blighted 1970s. It’s quite the manifesto for pessimism, given that the 70s clothes are far more elegant than the 1960s – and to modern eyes, more timeless.

Hulanicki was more visionary than pessimist. She launched make-up in colours that predated Mac’s wacky spectrum by three decades – like Valentino red, “Biba aubergine” was a recognised shade, and they were still painting the walls of the exhibition with it when I walked round – she sold lampshades before Ralph Lauren ever considered going into homeware, and she generally had a ball as a key London figure before running off to Brazil and depositing all her Biba belongings in a dump by a favela so that anyone might help themselves. Rather as they had in her shop. A blast – like this show.

The Biba Story: 1964–75 runs from tomorrow to Sept 8. Tickets: fashiontextilemuseum.org; 020 7407 8664