Bill Gibb: The History Boy

Inspired by medieval clothing and pre-Raphaelite painting, the 1970s fashion designer Bill Gibb invented the hippie look that defined the decade. So why is his name all but forgotten? Linda Grant recalls a true romantic

In the summer of 1970 a friend and I laboriously made ourselves long coats out of multicoloured patchwork velvet squares. The sleeves were gathered at the armholes because we didn't know how to fit them, and they fell like the tunic of a medieval page-boy, wide at the wrists. We were dedicated followers of fashion who had grown out of Chelsea Girl, the 1960s equivalent of Topshop, but it would be a year or two before we discovered the vintage stalls at Kensington Market. With our hennaed hair, kohl-rimmed eyes and Biba purple lipstick, we wafted about in Afghan dresses, skirts made of Indian bedspreads and loose velvet tops from India with tiny mirrors inset in the embroidery. Nothing matched. The clash of colour and texture was the point. The only rule was that you must not look anything like your mother, who had outrageously started to wear her skirts an inch or two above the knee.

Because we were only teenagers, what we knew about clothes came not from the fashion press (Vogue was scarily grown-up), but from copying everyone we knew. So I was completely unaware, until I opened the pages of a new book about his life and work, that for a period of about three years in my late teens and early twenties, I had been a walking advertisement for Bill Gibb. Gibb's early death at the age of 44 in 1988, and his too-brief period in the 1970s as one of the defining designers of his age, has meant that he has been partly forgotten - except by those who wore his clothes. He dressed Bianca Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor, Anjelica Huston, Marie Helvin and Twiggy, who described Gibb as 'my knight in shining armour', after he rescued her car from a snowdrift on a cold London day in 1967.

Of the British designers of the 1960s - Mary Quant, Jean Muir, Zandra Rhodes, Frank Usher and Ossie Clark (his great rival) - it was Gibb who best captured the hippie moment. In reaction to the stark modernism of André Courrèges and Yves Saint Laurent, fashion suddenly turned romantic, looking both to the distant past of the medieval world and to pre-Raphaelite painting, as well as to the ethnic influences of north Africa. Hippies found their style in the dressing-up box, mixing patchwork with lace. Gibb's revolutionary approach was to put together things that didn't match: checks, tartans, stripes, spots, Liberty florals and Fair Isle knits, sometimes in the same garment. The eclecticism was suited to the times, to a long-lost sense of experimentation and daydreaminess. It was slightly fey and overwhelmingly middle-class, but there was a DIY aspect to it that meant there was barely any chance you would turn up at a party in the same thing as anyone else. Style was down to the individual knowing how to put together a look out of disparate objects and patterns. And that was due to Bill Gibb...

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