Philip Green has been turning a profit from women's clothes for over 40 years. Green was raised in middle-class Croydon and North London, by his father Simon Green, a property developer turned electrical retailer, who died when Green was 12; and by his mother Alma, who owned and ran a launderette chain. Aged eight, Green was sent to a smart Oxfordshire boarding school; at 15, he walked out of it without any qualifications, and launched himself into the business of retailing women's shoes. But it wasn't until he was 33 that Green first struck gold when he sold the Jean Jeanie denim chain for £3 million, having bought it for a paltry £65,000 a year earlier. There followed a succession of ups and downs (highlights: in the late Eighties, under Green, retail concern Amber Day does hideously badly, Green gets ousted by the City; in 1998 he restores his reputation by buying Sears UK and breaking it up for enormous profit; in 1999 he launches his first hostile bid to take over Marks & Spencer, which fails, he'll try it again in 2004, to the chagrin of his former friend Stuart Rose.) In 2002, Green bought Arcadia, which has flourished, essentially under him.