As a child living in Jerusalem, we used to visit churches and convents. I always wanted to redesign the nuns’ outfits – they just weren’t dressed correctly. Jesus wasn’t a very good designer.
I have no temper. I like people too much. I really love them. I think it’s from living in a big family.
I had a mum who was so beautiful it was embarrassing. I used to stand outside the front door and give away all her clothes from Paris to anyone who needed them, which was not very popular.
There’s nothing I’m scared of. When you’re younger you’re scared of dying. As you get older, it seems rather fun. I can’t wait – there must be a big party going on on the other side.
Finding the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with is so instant, it’s so obvious, it’s absolutely amazing. It doesn’t often come. You’re very lucky if you get one such person in your lifetime and I had one. It was so wonderful.
“Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey!” Our first accountant at Biba gave me that advice and it’s the best advice I’ve ever been given. We should have put that on a T-shirt.
When I was very, very small I used to follow my father around like a little dog. He was the biggest person in my life and I get very angry that I didn’t have longer with him.
The thing to do with grief is to bottle it and it just keeps. You don’t want to be a bore to people. They’ve got their own problems.
I don’t cry at all, that’s the trouble. I think probably it would help a lot if one cried. But it’s such a physical emotion – and I don’t like smudging my makeup!
It’s terribly distracting if you are all working together creatively and someone is wearing colour. Everyone’s always looking at the colour, you’re thinking about it too much. With black, there’s just a screen.
When I first arrived in England and went to boarding school, I sat in my dormitory and told all my friends-to-be about the horror of the concentration camps. Two days later I was called in by the headmistress. She said, you’ve got to stop telling the children terrible stories like that.
When I was 19 I entered a fashion competition run by the Evening Standard. Aunt Sophie [her mother’s half-sister, who took Barbara and her family under her wing following the assassination of her father, a UN mediator during the partitioning of Palestine in 1948] wanted me to enter a design for a dress, but I entered swimsuits and won the competition. To serve me right, they made samples of the outfits out of taffeta – it was obviously the only roll of fabric they had tucked underneath the table. To me, taffeta was like auntie hell. All I wanted at that age was cotton, cotton, cotton.
The truth does not frighten me. I think it’s better to let it out. It can gnaw and make you very nervous. That’s my upbringing, I think. Mummy taught us to tell the truth. If we didn’t, we were in trouble.
Joy comes from the marvellous people you are with and everybody being happy. The results are usually very good.
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I don’t know how I would like to be remembered. My greatest achievement is yet to come.
The trick about life is to tell yourself it’s fine – and it becomes fine.
The Biba Story, 1964-1975, is at the Fashion & Textile Museum until 8 September, fashiontextilemuseum.org
