Peter York

Moderne times

Fifty years ago, the art historian Bevis Hillier named and explained art deco in a new kind of book – and ushered in its revival

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. She’s wearing a black beaded dress, a bandeau and clutches a long cigarette-holder. Behind her are potted palms and bronzed light fittings in the manner of Chiparus’s and Preiss’s exultant women. Above her is the Rainbow Room’s curvilinear ceiling with the concealed lighting turned up to mauve. (It was a familiar look for Twiggy; in 1971 she’d played Polly Browne in Ken Russell’s film version of The Boyfriend, a 1950s stage pastiche of a 1920s film musical. A revival of a revival.)

Fifty years ago, the art and design historian Bevis Hillier named and explained art deco in a new kind of art book. Deco was the interwar style whose 1960s revival was becoming a dominant design influence in everything from smart movie settings to graphics, architecture and interiors.

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