Barbara Hulanicki : The Queen of Biba

Barbara Hulanicki
Photography: Aldona Karczmarczyk

From Paper Magazine / February 21, 2019
by Christopher Barnard

”…In the 11-year reign of Biba, which grew to encompass four successive shops in London and one briefly in Brighton, the locations were less "stores" and more "happenings," existing as the platonic ideal and living manifestation of the liberation and experimentation going on in fashion and culture in the British capital. Twiggy, Bowie and Yoko were regulars, and Freddie Mercury met his girlfriend and partner Mary Austin while she was a shopgirl there. "[Freddie] was so very clever. He told me to get the roof garden [at the final Biba store] restricted so nobody could touch it. He was really thinking," Hulanicki recalls. The garden still stands today. There's another name you may recognize who got her start at Biba: None other than a teenage Anna Wintour had a stint at the second Biba on Kensington Church Street. "She was great and very quiet, terribly quiet. She worked in the changing room, poor thing," Hulanicki recalls.”
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