"Unpromising and even tragic beginnings are no barrier to success – as fashion designer "
Barbara Hulanicki and businessman Theo Paphitis show. By Maeve Hosea
Barbara
In 1964 London was swinging and Londoners’ green feather boas and spangly mini-dresses came from Barbara Hulanicki’s boutique Biba. Fast forward to this summer and high-street fashion chain Topshop has recreated that spirit with its much anticipated Barbara Hulanicki for Topshop collection and revived the designer’s profile for a new generation.
As the daughter of a Polish diplomat, Barbara Hulanicki was always destined to live an itinerant life. When she was just three, at the outbreak of the Second World War, her father was posted to Palestine, where family lived until 1948, when her father was assassinated.
Hulanicki remembers: “Most of my friends went to refugee camps in Cyprus. I was brought up with children who were starving and thought nothing of eating dead dogs.”
Her mother moved the family to Brighton and a very different life to that in cosmopolitan Jerusalem. “It was incredibly different in England then because you didn’t really have foreigners,” Hulanicki remembers. “Everyone laughed at my name and I was terrified of having to read out loud in class.”
Growing up with a chic mother and an aunt who lived at Brighton’s Metropole Hotel, where Hulanicki got her first glimpses of glamorous girls in wonderful clothes on jaunts from London, fashion was a natural fit for her. She came into the industry after art school by way of doing fashion illustrations for glossy magazines. Inspired by her husband, ad man Stephen Fitz-Simon, the Biba brand was born after a sassy gingham dress she designed was publicised in the Daily Mirror and sold 17,000.
“I opened a shop,” she says, “and it was really organic the way it worked – one minute I had all these smocks in there and the next it was full of girls trying them on.”
From its beginnings as a tiny boutique in a Kensington side-street, Biba grew over the years to become a cult label and fashion destination, eventually occupying all five floors of a glamorous Art Deco department store on Kensington High Street. It was the place to go and Biba clothes were worn by celebrities from Mick Jagger to Brigitte Bardot.
Having lost control of her Biba fashion empire in the mid-Seventies, Hulanicki started a fashion business in Brazil. She and her husband later moved to Miami, where she designs hotel interiors and now lives alone since her husband’s death 12 years ago. “My childhood has influenced me not to plan but to just live from one thing to the other,” she says. “The minute you really care for things you lose them.”
Theo
Businessman Theo Paphitis, best known for his appearances on the TV series Dragon’s Den, has made a career out of reviving the fortunes of high-street names such as the stationers Ryman and the lingerie retailer La Senza as well as boosting Millwall Football Club with his chairmanship.Born in Cyprus in 1959, Paphitis‘s childhood was marked by economic hardship. His parents decided to make a fresh start in England in 1966.
After Manchester, where his father found work seven nights a week as a bouzouki player in a Greek restaurant, he and his parents moved to London where the family broke up and Paphitis struggled with dyslexia.
The road to becoming a self-made millionaire started for Paphitis at the age of 16 when he became a tea boy and filing clerk with Lloyds of London. Taking opportunities to move into the worlds of insurance, property and retail, and feeling that business success is possible for anyone who is bright and keen, Paphitis is now the retail apprentices’ champion of the government-funded Skillsmart Retail scheme which advocates an apprentice training system for young employees.
Paphitis says: “It is imperative that you have an idea that you really believe in, and you also have to be absolutely determined you can make it work. But if you don’t attempt to do it, it will never happen. Don’t let your idea be the one that got away.”
