Barbara Hulanicki & Mary Quant
It was the British designer Mary Quant who first married fun and fashion and lit the fuse of the insurrection that Hulanicki brought to the high street
By CATHERINE MAYER
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Photograph for TIME by
DAVID BAILEY |
| TWO TRENDY: Hulanicki, at left, and Quant put the swing into the ‘60s and made retailing sexy |
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Pausing to snatch a paisley dress from the rack, the shopper ran, screaming, for the exit. A terror group, the Angry Brigade, had planted a bomb in the London clothing store, Biba, on May Day 1971. "The only thing you can do with modern slave houses—called boutiques—is WRECK THEM," read the group's communiqué, concluding with a single word: REVOLUTION. Their bomb duly exploded, but did less damage than shoplifters—light-fingered customers, who'd already inflicted annual losses amounting to 12% of Biba's sales, took full advantage of the sudden evacuation to loot the place.
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 Deco–infused 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 hemlines—and smiles.
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April 28, 2004 |
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October 11, 2004 |
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October 10, 2005 |
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