DAVID BAILEY
In truth, that store had always been revolutionary. Launched by Barbara Hulanicki in 1964, Biba overthrew the rules of retailing. Selling Hulanicki's young, witty clothes cheaply, Biba recast shopping as entertainment. Fans lingered on the shop floor and, after Hulanicki's hubristic takeover of a department store, spent whole days reveling in the Art Decoinfused Biba experience. A storyteller in a castle kept children amused; their parents hung out in the nightclub.
It was another British designer, Mary Quant, who first married fun and fashion and lit the fuse of the insurrection that Hulanicki brought to the high street. Quant opened her London boutique Bazaar in 1955, a sedate era of couture geared to the middle-aged. She went on to pioneer such seditionary designs as miniskirts and micro-minis, hotpants, plastic macs and makeup displayed in little flowered pots. Accused of seeking to transform society, Quant replied that she was simply reflecting "what is really in the air," inhaling the spirit of the Swinging Sixties as she spoke.
Both Biba and Bazaar, like the era that spawned them, died with the onset of a harsher age. But Hulanicki and Quant are evergreen, their influence even now raising hemlinesand smiles.