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Trouble at Topshop, review: a tragic rise-and-fall story lacking its villain

Topshop went into administration in 2021 - BBC
Topshop went into administration in 2021 - BBC

To emerge from Oxford Circus Tube station and see an empty retail space where Topshop once stood still feels quite odd. Apparently Ikea is set to move in, which is even odder, because part of the Ikea experience involves pulling into a car park in a bleak location beside a dual carriageway.

But Topshop was once the epicentre of Oxford Street, where hordes of teenagers and 20-somethings would descend on Saturday afternoons not just to buy clothes but in the hope of being picked up by model agencies who were said to have scouts stationed outside on the lookout for the next Kate Moss.

Moss made an appearance in Trouble at Topshop (BBC Two), albeit in archive footage. It was a stroke of marketing genius from Philip Green to sign the supermodel as a face of the brand. The decision didn’t go down too well with the team that ran Topshop, however, including boss Jane Shepherdson. It signalled that Green was going to take a more hands-on approach to the business; this meant greater exposure to his management style, which consisted of shouting, swearing and – eventually – casually taking a phone call in the middle of Shepherdson’s resignation speech.

The story of Topshop’s rise and fall is reasonably interesting, but does it merit a two-part prime-time documentary? It is all told from the point of view of Shepherdson and her team, with added input from journalists and fashion observers. The man himself appears only in archive interviews and descriptions by his detractors, which is a shame – a programme in which 
he angrily (does Green have another mode?) gave his side of the story could have been a corker.

Shepherdson and co clearly loved the brand and the clothes they produced. There is no denying that Topshop was hugely successful and influential, its clothes worn by women of all ages. It was also pretty cheap, albeit not at the Primark level. The contributors here spoke at length about beautiful cuts and fabrics, but that’s certainly not my memory of Topshop clothes. Still, it remains a loss to the high street.