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