Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the designer Barbara Hulliniki.

Today her creativity spans fashion, illustration, interior design and architecture.

But it was the success of the label Beba that first made her name,

launching a high street revolution with its opulent looking but entirely affordable high fashion.

According to Twiggy, she changed fashion in England

single-handedly. A newspaper advert for a three-quid pink-gingham dress in 1963 kicked things off. By the 70s her big beba London department store was a

throbbing temple to all things skinny fitted in plum mulberry green brown and

black romantic mysterious nostalgic and very profitable. But when it all turns

sour with her business partners, she and her husband Fitz walked away, leaving behind the

hugely popular creation that had made her name.

The fantasy world of Beboeboeboe was a far cry from the harsh reality of her childhood.

Born in Poland just before the Second World War, the air of privilege that surrounded her family was

dramatically punctured when her father, a diplomat, was assassinated. She says, now, whenever

I finish something, I take some photographs and say goodbye. When you lose everything,

you realize that the only thing you have is what's in your head. So Barbara Holiniki, for a designer,

style must be of prime importance to you. You are cutting a very

stylish figure this morning. Can you take listeners through what it is

you're wearing today? Well, I'm wearing black because it's nothing to do with style,

is to do with laziness.

...