Claiborne Men's Fashion Brand

First a bit of history on the company, because the men's brand cannot be told without the company behind it. Liz Claiborne is best known for co-founding Liz Claiborne Inc., which in 1986 became the first company founded by a woman to make the Fortune 500 list. The 'Claiborne' brand had been the men's collection for the Liz Claiborne company. Those two sentences are the profile's foundation: a founder whose company broke a Fortune 500 barrier in 1986, and a men's label that existed as that company's menswear arm. A man researching a Claiborne garment is therefore researching a chapter of the Liz Claiborne company, and this profile keeps the company record whole.

The renaming chain that follows is dated at every step. On May 15, 2012, Liz Claiborne Inc. officially became Fifth & Pacific, Inc. until February 25, 2014. Then the name changed to Kate Spade & Company, a fashion company that designs and markets a range of women's and men's apparel, accessories and fragrance products under the Kate Spade New York and Jack Spade labels. Read carefully, the chain tells a researcher where the Claiborne men's collection did - and did not - end up: the company that once owned it renamed itself twice and became the Kate Spade house, while the Claiborne name itself travelled by a separate transaction, told in the next section.

The JC Penney Sale of November 2011

In November 2011, the Company announced that it has completed the transaction to sell domestic and international trademark rights of its Liz Claiborne family of brands and domestic trademark rights of its Monet brand to JC Penney. What JC Penney bought was trademark rights: the Liz Claiborne family of brands, domestically and internationally, plus the domestic rights to Monet. Learn more about men's Claiborne clothing at the JC Penney website - this page's References carry that JCPenney link, because the retailer is where the record leaves the men's brand living.

The directory frame around Claiborne is a company-research cluster, in this page's lists: Liz Claiborne News, the Liz Claiborne company profile in the names section, Liz Claiborne Financial, the Liz Claiborne Definition and Liz Claiborne Careers, alongside the standard Men's Fashion Brands index and its further pages. Read as a buying guide, the record sets honest expectations: Claiborne menswear in this telling is a department-store men's collection with a distinguished company history - the men's line of the first woman-founded Fortune 500 company - sold under trademark rights held by JC Penney since November 2011. No garment list, prices or fabrics for the men's line are stated; the history and the transaction are what date and place a Claiborne garment.

Reading This Claiborne Record

One distinction worth keeping carefully, because readers trip on it: the company and the brand parted ways. The company became Fifth & Pacific in 2012 and Kate Spade & Company in 2014, designing under the Kate Spade New York and Jack Spade labels; the Claiborne brand's trademark rights went to JC Penney in 2011, before either rename. A Claiborne men's shirt is therefore not a Kate Spade product in this record, whatever the corporate genealogy suggests, and a researcher who keeps the two transactions separate - rename chain on one side, trademark sale on the other - will read every Claiborne label correctly.

Claiborne, under C in the Men's Fashion Brands directory: the men's collection of Liz Claiborne Inc., the company Liz Claiborne co-founded that in 1986 became the first company founded by a woman to make the Fortune 500, whose Liz Claiborne family trademark rights were sold to JC Penney in November 2011, a year before the company renamed itself Fifth & Pacific and then, in 2014, Kate Spade & Company.

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