Biba bows to the inevitable

The news that the fashion firm Biba International has called in the receivers inevitably sparks a feeling of deja vu. The original Biba (for those who were there, the only true Biba), founded in 1964 by designer Barbara Hulanicki, began as a tiny boutique in Kensington and grew rapidly to become one of the great symbols of Swinging London.

By 1973 it had become 'Big Biba', occupying all seven floors of a fully fledged department store. But two years later, it crashed and burned, a victim of the chronic recession of the 1970s.

Now, with Mervyn King's warning of more hard times ahead, Tony Blair's Cool Britannia is looking even more remote than the Swinging Sixties themselves. And Biba has fallen again. Big Biba was built as a fantasy version of retail theatre. Its design owed more to the stage-sets of a Hollywood musical than it did to the High Street, providing the public with romantic escapism from the misery of power-cuts and three-day weeks. It was, said the press, "the most beautiful store in the world". Or even "the hallowed Mecca of the near-decadent".

Liberace held his birthday party there, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Freddie Mercury were regular visitors, and the New York Dolls played in the Rainbow Room restaurant, helping launch what became the punk movement. It attracted superstars, sightseers and secretaries in equal measure, all happy to spend their time ­ if not their money ­ hanging out at Biba.

And then the property crash caught up with it, and the shutters were pulled down on Biba for what seemed like the last time. "It really is the end of a dream," noted Tony Benn in his diary, having visited the closing-down sale. He showed few regrets for this "final fling for the excrescences of Sixties fashion, now all gone bust."

There have been doomed attempts to relaunch the Biba brand ever since, though without the involvement or backing of Hulanicki herself. Most recently it was revived as an upmarket fashion label, attracting positive headlines and widespread interest for its catwalk collections. Now, it seems, the plugs have been pulled on that venture as well, though there is still talk of "keeping the Biba name alive".

But just as Benn regarded it as an anachronism in the dark days created by Ted Heath's doomed premiership, perhaps there is no room either for Biba in Gordon Brown's Britain. As belts are tightened, it is possibly time to say farewell to Biba. Finally.

Alwyn Turner is author of 'Crisis? What Crisis?', a history of popular culture and poiltics in the UK in the 1970, released this month by Aurum Press ·