Westclox × Biba

Announced September 10, 1973, the day Big Biba opened on Kensington High Street, the Biba Ben was sold from a single black lacquered counter on the cosmetics floor, between the kohl pencils and the false lashes. Westclox wanted a way into the women's magazines, and Barbara Hulanicki had wanted a clock for the Biba bedroom department since 1971. Her brief to Dumbarton fitted on one line: it must look like something you would leave open on your dressing table.

Robert Welch, who had been drawing alarm clocks for the Scottish factory for fourteen years, started from the Baby Ben movement and built a side-hinged clamshell around it, taking the corner radii from the Travalarm and the proportions from the Biba compact. John McConnell drew the dial: twelve Deco numerals in the same hand as the Biba logo, printed gold on black. The lid is a single disc of bronze-tinted half-silvered glass of the kind Whitmore-Thomas were fitting downstairs. Closed, in daylight, it shows only your reflection. In the dark, the luminous hands glow faintly through it.

The mechanism is why anyone remembers it. A cam on the hinge lifts a steel lever clear of the bell hammer as the lid shuts, so closing the clock at night arms the alarm, and the only way to stop it in the morning is to swing the mirror into view. Welch drew a top shut-off button as well; Hulanicki had it removed. Nova called it 'the first clock that assumes you will want to look at yourself before you look at the time'. The Daily Telegraph found it too loud for a lady's bedroom, which Westclox reprinted on the trade leaflet.

The glass was silvered in Glasgow and cut to exactly 74 mm, the diameter of the Biba pressed-powder compact, so that a replacement mirror could be bought over the cosmetics counter. None ever was. Clocks were packed in a black card box printed with the gold logo and lined with mulberry tissue, and the instruction leaflet ran to one sentence.