With its celebrity collaborations and turbo-charged launches, Philip Green’s Topshop brought fun and drama to the once uninspiring business of clothes-shopping. We chart the rise and fall of the pandemic’s most glamorous corporate victim
“What’s this I’m reading in the paper? It’s a load of absolute shit, that’s what it is. What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid or what? I’ve never read so much rubbish in my life.”
It was February 2010, and I was at my desk in the Guardian office. Philip Green didn’t need to introduce himself. His habit of bellowing down the phone was unmistakable, and I had just written an article about how I was falling out of love with Topshop after a decade being in thrall to its shop floor. Green never did take kindly to criticism of the golden child of his Arcadia empire.