The first time I visited Biba

Thursday 18th August   

As you know I had been quite impressed by the wallpaper in Adrian’s little flat. He told me that it came from Biba, a new shop I had started to notice popping up in magazine articles and had even been mentioned in the Evening News a couple of times.  The wallpaper was a rich dark chocolate brown with large swirls of fine gold lines running through it in great loops and arcs and, the effect was amazing.  It was like nothing I had ever seen; completely contemporary yet with an almost antique feel at the same time.  I was intrigued; I had heard that the shop had some brilliant new fashions, but was completely unaware that it sold wallpaper and paint too.  We decided to visit and took a couple of buses to Kensington. The shop was almost opposite Derry and Toms that I had been taken to year after year to buy my clothes in as a child. But Kensington was fast changing from the staid Edwardian shops I had been accustomed to; it was now a hodgepodge of sixties psychadelia and full of tie-die T shirts, and tiny shops with joss-sticks burning in profusion.  Oh, and loud music too, lots of it blaring from every doorway.  It was quite intimidating, but Adrian felt quite at home here, as if this was his milieu, his spiritual home.  Across the street the large department stores were still catering to the upper and upper middle-class ladies that Grandma purported to be, and right opposite and almost squeezing them out was all of this, well, hippie stuff I suppose; a very disconcerting mix.

The shop itself was amazing, it was on about four floors with a sweeping staircase like some cornucopia literally spilling clothes and hats and coats along its banisters.  The walls and the ceiling were all painted in loud colours; bright yellows and greens and sky blues, and there was some sort of bubble machine too, making huge wobbly bubbles that floated in the smoky air, because almost everyone was smoking, hopefully just tobacco.  I was too star-struck to really look at the clothes, but they were again a strange mix of the very modern, bias-cut and outrageous hard colours, along with floaty-drifting silks and chiffons and full-length dresses that shouted out “thirties cocktail bars” at you.  And all the assistants were stick-thin and elegant and had masses of make-up on, especially eye make-up, looking like smudged panda’s with sharp cheekbones.  It was really the most amazing shop I had ever been in, and I would return many times just to marvel at the ever changing scene but I don’t remember actually ever buying a thing there.