Seems like only yesterday that the wife and I (yes, that’s what I said) were shopping at the deco-rific Biba store in London, she selecting lipstick and eyeshadow in the new shades of plum, brown, and dried blood, I admiring the boutique’s rolls of art nouveau wallpaper and cans of paint in the new shades of plum, brown, and dried blood. Seems like yesterday, but it was 1970. If we had known then how important and historically dolly-rocking it was. . . Well, you never know at the time, do you?

The fashionable Biba (Bee‘-ba) had opened in unfashionable Kensington in 1964, as London was about to become famously “swinging” – which Biba greatly contributed to. Its proprietor, designer, and hostess, Barbara Hulanicki, would move the shop many times before, in 1969, it took up its two-year residence in the old Derry & Toms department store in Kensington High Street, as a full-on, full-service, dazzlingly impressive department store in itself, an environment of art deco/nouveau splendor complete with lush and expansive roof garden and Rainbow Room restaurant. It had been the first department store to open in London since WWII and, frankly, Macy’s and Harrod’s paled in its shadow. In 1975, Biba closed for good. Those were the days, my friend

The entire story of the store, the designer, the fashion, and the times are now wonderfully, exhaustively explained and lavishly illustrated in The Biba Experience, a heavenly book from Antique Collectors’ Club, published on the 40th anniversary of the opening of the first store and a must-have for designers, decorators, and ordinary Anglophiles. It’s a collaboration between Alwyn W Turner, an authority on ’60s and ’70s popular culture, and Pari, a leading expert on Biba and unrivaled collector of Biba fashion and memorabilia.

Left, Barbara Hulanicki in 1969; right, elevator designed by Walter Gilbert, in the Derry & Toms store

Top, models from Biba’s first mail-order catalogue; center, changing room designed by Whitmore-Thomas; inset, suede platforms with diamanté trim