Moderne times

On 10 September 1973 the 1930s Kensington High Street department store formerly known as Derry & Toms reopened as Big Biba. It sold the dress designer Barbara Hulanicki’s distinctive look in furniture, paints and wallpaper, sports equipment and food, as well as her familiar fast fashion. If you had to define that aesthetic then, you’d have said it was campy and kitschy. But above all you’d have said it was deco, an increasingly familiar word for the between-wars moderne style in everything from buildings to jewellery.

Derry & Toms itself was a 1933 moderne temple of commerce, slathered in stylised ironwork and bas-reliefs. It had a ‘Rainbow Room’ upstairs, which looked like a 1930s cinema crossed with an ocean-liner ballroom, and the largest roof garden in Europe above it. The new Biba furnishings and the packaging in that Biba food hall were all 1930s-inflected, pastiche deco.

And here’s Twiggy, photographed by Justin de Villeneuve in Big Biba that year, in what in the early 1970s would have been called a ‘divine decadence’ pose, following the famous strapline for Cabaret, the hit film musical of 1972 based on Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin.