Barbara Hulanicki | Fashion Designer and founder of Biba | Jeffery Salter celebrity portrait photographer |
Fashion designer Barbara Hulanicki who founded the iconic clothing store Biba. She was photographed by Miami based advertising and commercial photographer Jeffery Salter. Jeffrey is an award winning photographer who also does fitness and celebrity portraiture. He does location photography in Atlanta, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, NYC , Los Angeles and Dallas. Barbara Hulanicki OBE (b. 1936) is a fashion designer, born in Warsaw, Poland, to Polish parents and best known as the founder of iconic clothes store Biba.[1]
Her father, Witold Hulanicki, was assassinated by the Stern Gang in Jerusalem in 1948,[2] and the family moved to Brighton, England.[3][4] While studying from 1954 to 1956 at the Brighton School of Art, now the University of Brighton Faculty of Arts, Hulanicki won a London Evening Standard-newspaper competition in 1955 for beachwear. She began her career in fashion as a freelance fashion illustrator for various magazines, including Vogue, Tatler and Women's Wear Daily.
Hulanicki sold her first designs through a small mail-order business that was featured in the fashion columns of newspapers such as the London Daily Mirror.
In 1964, she opened her Biba shop in the Kensington district of London with the help of her late husband, Stephen Fitz-Simon. The shop soon became known for its stylishly decadent atmosphere and lavish decor inspired by Art Nouveau and Art Deco. It became a hangout for artists, film stars and rock musicians, including Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Marianne Faithfull and Cathy McGowan, presenter of British pop/rock TV programme Ready Steady Go!. In the shop, a young clientele bought affordable mini-skirts, floppy felt hats, feather boas, velvet trouser suits and unisex T-shirts dyed in rich, muted colors. Incidentally, Anna Wintour started in fashion as a Biba employee.
After the shop's 1976 demise, Hulanicki continued to work in the fashion industry, designing for labels such as Fiorucci and Cacharel and, from 1980 to 1992, designed a line of children's wear, Minirock, licensed to the Japanese market.
She presently resides in Miami, Florida, where she has an interior-design business, designing hotels for Chris Blackwell in Jamaica and the Bahamas. She has designed wallpaper for the Habitat store chain in Europe and is launching a fashion and home range in India and also wallpaper in her widely recognized Art Nouveau style for Graham & Brown.[5]