Bill Gibb was born in 1943 on his family's farm in the tiny village of New Pitsligo, Aberdeenshire. He studied at Saint Martin's School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1968. He worked for the ready-to-wear label Baccarat for two years and launched his own label, Bill Gibb, in 1972.

The Vocabulary

Gibb's signature was a layered, deliberately excessive romanticism drawn from medieval and Renaissance dress, pre-Raphaelite painting, Celtic embroidery, and Scottish tartans. His collections assembled patchwork knits, tiered chiffon skirts, embroidered velvet bodices, and painted-silk prints into what he called "clothes for stories." He collaborated, through the early 1970s, with the American textile designer Kaffe Fassett, who produced hand-knit patchwork pullovers specifically for Gibb's runway.

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I want women to wear clothes that tell stories. Plain clothes are for plain lives. — Bill Gibb

Twiggy

The twenty-year-old Twiggy chose a Bill Gibb dress — embroidered with gold shooting stars, tiered chiffon skirt, medieval sleeves — to wear to the premiere of The Boy Friend in 1971. Vogue photographed her in it repeatedly; the dress became, within the season, one of the most-reproduced silhouettes of the early 1970s. Vogue named Gibb Designer of the Year in 1970.

The Commercial Decline

Like Clark, like Zandra Rhodes, like much of the Chelsea counter-culture cohort of the early 1970s, Gibb had no business training and very little business sense. His company went through four bankruptcies between 1975 and 1985. He sold licences, closed his couture line, sold the company name, and spent his last years working freelance on costume design for film and stage.

Gibb died of throat cancer in London in 1988 at 44. The Bowes Museum in County Durham mounted a retrospective, Bill Gibb: Fashion and Fantasy, in 2017; it remains the single major scholarly treatment of his work.