FROM A TO BIBA by Barbara Hulanicki (V&A 2007)

I thought this would make an interesting follow-up to Quant by Quant, since these are both autobiographies by two of the most central figures in Swinging London fashion (here's a great site with a brief history of Biba and pictures of clothing by a serious collector). There are quite a few interesting points for comparison and contrast. Well before Mary Quant opened her store, she was already very much a part of the bohemian scene that would further coalesce and grow around it. Barbara Hulanicki, on the other hand, started out with a mail-order business, designing clothes to suit her taste, and once she opened her shop, she was pretty much thrust to the middle of the scene when her taste turned out to be shared by powerhouse trend-setters like Cathy McGowan and Julie Christie.

Whereas Quant was right in tune with the culture of her customers, Hulanicki often comes across as kind of a square and an outsider who's a little dismayed at some of the cultural trends that her clothing became associated with. Quant's success unfolded pretty straightforwardly according to her vision, but Hulanicki often struggled to keep up with hers, and sometimes felt confused by the turns it took. Frequently overwhelmed, she often had to resort to makeshift fixes, which to her astonishment were enthusiastically embraced by customers as part of the Biba brand. For example, part of what made Biba seem edgy and modern was the communal dressing room where young typists and shopgirls tried on the latest fashions alongside true blue-bloods and A-list celebrities. In Quant's Bazaar, something like that would have been on purpose, but in Hulanicki's Biba it wasn't. What happened was, the initial meager changing facilities were so overwhelmed that girls were stripping down to try stuff on right out on the sales floor. Alarmed, Hulanicki quickly moved her office upstairs and started arranging for the former office space to be converted into changing rooms. Customers simply didn't bother waiting for cubicles to be constructed, though. As soon as they understood that the old office would be a changing area, they just crowded in and started changing. Hulanicki realized there was no point in fighting it, so she just put in some mirrors and let it be.

As with Quant's autobiography, what we get in Hulanicki's is a nice slice of grooviness sandwiched between younger years and a time when the demands of a growing business monopolize her attention. However discombobulated she may be by her meteoric rise, there's real wide-eyed wonder and joy in the early days when she becomes to fashion the equivalent of what the Beatles were to music at that time. One difference is, Quant wrote her story in the sixties when she was still going from strength to strength; Hulanicki wrote hers much later (1983, I think--that's the copyright date), after things had gone quite sour for her and she'd left her own company on bad terms.

If this is the sort of thing that interests you, I'd highly recommend it!