Inside ‘Biba:’ The iconic London store where Anna Wintour was a shop girl

With a roof garden featuring flamingos and penguins, David Bowie and Mick Jagger dining in the restaurant and a carousel ride, it’s no wonder this store was a hit.

“My God, it’s dull,” said interior designer Steven Thomas of the British retail landscape in 2024. As the creative force behind the look of the wildly popular 1970s London fashion store Big Biba, Thomas knows a thing or two about engineering excitement. Big Biba — a daring, 20,000 square foot destination by fashion illustrator Barbara Hulanicki and her former marketing executive husband, Stephen Fitz-Simon — was conceived with a level of detail usually reserved for high-end concept stores. Opened in September 1973, it was the fourth and final outpost of the-then iconic brand. The seven-floor Art Deco emporium on London’s fashionable Kensington High Street featured a soup stand inspired by Andy Warhol, a roof garden featuring real flamingos and penguins, and a much-lauded celebrity hotspot the “Rainbow Room”. “Because the Rainbow Room looked the way it did, it didn’t take long for the glitterati to latch on; it was very much a place to be seen dining,” recalled Thomas in an interview with CNN. Originally designed by architect Marcel Hennequet in 1933 and named after its multi-colored ceiling (the dining room was otherwise all white tablecloths and fake plants), it “became a venue of choice,” he suggested. “David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Bryan Ferry all dropped in.” “Fitz employed the son of a friend who had an extraordinary knack of picking people up, like Ian Dury and the Blockheads,” continued Thomas, recalling the unofficial booker. “He got the New York Dolls to play when they came over, another coup. They did a vandalizing tour of the first floor, shoplifting all the women’s clothes.” These stories and more are all explored in “Welcome to Big Biba,” Thomas’s gold-fronted monograph of the venture republished this month by ACC Art Books to celebrate the brand’s 60th anniversary. “This book is a testament to creative freedom,” writes the now 87-year-old Hulanicki in the foreword, reflecting on her legacy. “You can do it all as long as you learn to wear a suit. Of course, your secret will be that the suit is lined in gold lamé.” The Biba story began in May 1964 when Hulanicki and Fitz-Simon began running “Biba’s Postal Boutique,” a mail-order store selling limited runs of stock. Singer Annie Lennox described the venture as having led “the way for those of us living in provincial places where we felt we were dying of drabness.”