BRENDA POLAN salutes the late Bill Gibb Master of fashion as fancy dress

Press, 27 January 1988, Page 12

BRENDA POLAN salutes the late Bill Gibb Master of fashion as fancy dress

Bill Gibb, the designer whose name conjures up the romanticism of the 19705, died early this month of cancer of the colon. He had been seriously ill for a year and recently had a second operation. Bill Gibb was 44 and a member of a generation of British designers whose feeling for fabric, texture, colour and decoration dominated the fashion world in the decade after the decline of the mini and the demise of sixties optimism. Gibb’s beautiful fantasy clothes, their imagery rooted in medievalism, Celtic romance and the lavish grandeur of court dress from many periods mated with a traditional theatrical-peasant love of layers of contrasting textures and patterns, matched the exoticism of the mid-seventies young. The political activism of the sixties had given away to a mystical yearning for love and peace; the avant garde were exploring “inner space”; hard times were ahead and presaged by a mood of nostalgic escapism. In such periods fashion habitually revives the dress of a /bygone “golden

age” and apes the costume of contemporary cultures which are perceived as sounder, less corrupt. Fashion assumes fancy dress. And nobody did it better than Bill Gibb. He was born in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, and grew up on a farm, one of seven children. His maternal grandmother was a painter who turned down a chance to i go to art school in order to do her filial duty and work on the farm. “But she always,” Bill once told me, “as my grandfather put it, ‘dabbled about’ and that was where I first saw an artist at work and knew that that was what I wanted.” He went straight to St Martin’s in London. He was the top student in his year and won a place at the Royal College of Art. He did not complete his post-graduate course. Success intervened. Annie Russell opened a shop in Abingdon Road selling only Bill Gibb designs; he won a Yardley fashion prize, Geraldine Stutz of Henri Bendel, the New York fashion store, commissioned an entire collection and the grande

dame of British fashion writers, Ernestine Carter asked rhetorically: “Who is his Bill Gibb?” and proceeded to tell everyone. .-At the R.C.A. Professor Janey Ironside sighed in a resigned sort of way and told Bill that he looked set to do quite well without a diploma and to get on with it. He expanded his activities to design for the upper mass-market company, Baccarat, and then, in 1971, he met Kathleen Franklin who asked him to design a collection for the Austrian Embroidery Federation to demonstrate the variety of trimmings available to the world’s clothing manufacturers in the Far East. They became friends and it was when leaning companionably over an Austrian balcony that he confided in her his secret wish to start his own company. Kate, who was to remain his business partner for more than a decade found a backer and, in 1972, Bill Gibb, Ltd, was launched. The period that followed was one of ever greater success climaxing in an event unequalled in the history of British

fashion: the Bill Gibb retrospective show at the Royal Albert Hall in November 1977. He was to describe it to me later as an act of hubris which was punished, some time later, by financial collapse. Undoubtedly, the accelerating recession had more to do with the failure than any outraged gods’ revenge.

The Albert Hall show was an amazing success. The Band of the Royal Marines played, Wayne Sleep danced and the world’s most beautiful models wore Bill Gibb dresses borrowed back from their owners — women like Bianca Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor, Sandie Shaw, Twiggy — watched by 7000 people. Years later Bill could

shudder at the audacity of it all but it was, in fact, what he lived for. “It was the whole production, the show,” said Kate Franklin after his death. “He was a passionate perfectionist. Every detail had to be exactly right. And although he loved women and loved making them look beautiful, he conceived a collection in terms of the show. The shows and working towards them was really the centre and mainspring of his life.” Bill Gibb’s life was centred on work and friends. He had no interest in possessions, had to be bullied into buying himself a suit, never took out a mortgage or encumbered himself with things. He was difficult to interview because he always wanted to talk about the interviewer, about mutual friends about what was going on in the world, not about Bill Gibb. Dogged manoeuvring could get him on to his work and then his eyes would light up and, gradually, the depth of his passion would be revealed. He disliked the John

Bratby portrait which hangs in Kate Franklin’s living room. He did not recognise the bearded child with huge eyes, farouche, innocent, lit from within; He thought it made him look manic. His friends felt', it did very well. —Copyright London “Guardian”