Elisabeth by Liz Claiborne Women's Fashion Brand

Elisabeth by Liz Claiborne was the fashion brand's plus size clothing brand: inside one of America's best-known women's clothing companies, Elisabeth was the label that carried the house's idea into plus sizes. To understand it, start with the founder. Anne Elisabeth Jane Claiborne was a Belgian-born American fashion designer and businesswoman whose success was built upon stylish yet affordable apparel for career women, featuring colourfully tailored separates that could be mixed and matched.

Claiborne is best known for co-founding Liz Claiborne Inc., the company behind the label. The house idea - colourful, tailored, mix-and-match separates for a working woman's wardrobe, stylish without being expensive - was one of the defining American sportswear formulas of its era, and Elisabeth applied that same formula where the industry too often offered less design for more money: the plus size rail. A shopper reading this page should judge Elisabeth pieces by the house standard: separates designed as a system, in colour, cut for a career.

The October 2011 Sale

In October 2011, Liz Claiborne Inc. said it was selling its namesake brand and several others to concentrate on its Juicy Couture, Lucky Brand and kate spade fashion brands. The company said it would sell the domestic and international trademark rights for both its Liz Claiborne brands, and the U.S. and Puerto Rico trademark rights for the Monet jewellery brand, to department store operator J.C. Penney Co. for about $288 million - the reason this label's later life runs through a department store rather than its founding company.

The brands covered by that sale show the scale of the Claiborne stable: Liz Claiborne, Claiborne, Liz, Liz&Co., Concepts by Claiborne, LC, Elizabeth, LizGolf, LizSport, Liz Claiborne New York (LCNY) and Lizwear. Elisabeth sits in that family as the plus size expression of the founding idea - Elizabeth appears in the sold list in its short form - and Apparel Search's Liz Claiborne News pages, linked from this page, carry the company's continuing record. A brand page that ends in a sale is not a failure story here; it is how American department-store fashion reorganised itself.

Shopping Mix-and-Match Separates

The Claiborne formula is a shopping method as much as a style: buy separates that were designed to combine - jackets, blouses, trousers and skirts in a shared palette - and the wardrobe multiplies itself. Judge Elisabeth pieces as the founder's customers were meant to: colour used confidently, tailoring that flatters rather than hides, and finishing honest at an affordable price. In plus sizes, fit is the design: a waistband that sits without rolling, a blouse with room to reach, a jacket that closes as cut - tried in motion, these tell you whether the piece honours the formula.

Because the label's later distribution ran through department stores, shoppers meet it on those rails and in resale, where the system pieces reward hunting in sets. Care is the working wardrobe's routine: separates washed as labelled, knits folded, tailoring hung. Belgian-born Anne Elisabeth Jane Claiborne built a career-women's empire on colourful tailored separates; Elisabeth was that idea, cut for plus size women - and judged on its own rail, by fit and colour and combination, it still teaches how a working wardrobe is built.