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Liz Claiborne, born Elisabeth Claiborne Ortenberg on March 31, 1929, is a Belgian-born fashion designer. She was born in Brussels and raised in New Orleans, left high school to study art in Europe, and worked in New York as a designer for 25 years before starting her own design company, Liz Claiborne, Inc., in 1976, beginning with active sportswear for women.
Liz Claiborne (born Elisabeth Claiborne Ortenberg March 31, 1929) is a Belgian-born fashion designer.
She was born in Brussels and raised in New Orleans. Rather than finishing high school, she went to Europe to study art. She worked in New York as a designer for 25 years before starting her own design company Liz Claiborne, Inc. in 1976. The firm grew from its origins designing active sportswear for women, to a billion-dollar enterprise with a full line of clothing for men and women. She retired from active management in 1989.
The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Claiborne 2/6/06
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Fashion Industry Fashion Models LA Fashion NY FashionLiz Claiborne was born Elisabeth Claiborne Ortenberg on March 31, 1929, in Brussels, and she is described as a Belgian-born fashion designer. Birthplace and upbringing are kept separate in her story: she was born in Brussels and raised in New Orleans. That pairing — a European birth and an American upbringing — places her between the two fashion worlds of her century, formed as a person in the United States while carrying a Belgian origin that distinguishes her from designers born and raised in a single American city. Her full birth name, Elisabeth Claiborne Ortenberg, is also the source of the shorter professional name, Liz Claiborne, under which her company would trade.
Her education took an unconventional route. Rather than finishing high school, she went to Europe to study art. The choice is significant in two ways. First, it prioritised direct artistic training over completing a standard school course, a gamble that only makes sense for someone already certain that visual work would be her career. Second, it returned her to Europe — the continent of her birth — for that training, so her formation combined American upbringing with European art study. Art study rather than fashion study is also notable: the foundation named is art itself, the broader discipline of line, color and composition, applied afterwards to clothing design rather than learned only through clothing.
She worked in New York as a designer for 25 years before starting her own design company. A quarter of a century is an unusually long apprenticeship at the professional level, and it changes how the founding that follows should be understood. Liz Claiborne, Inc. was not the venture of a newcomer testing an idea; it was founded by a designer with twenty-five years of experience of how New York fashion businesses designed, made and sold clothes for other people's labels. That experience would have shown her exactly where the market was underserved, because a working designer sees season after season which garments customers ask for and which the industry fails to supply well.
She started her own design company, Liz Claiborne, Inc., in 1976. The firm grew from its origins designing active sportswear for women. Starting with active sportswear for women is a precise and telling choice of entry point. Sportswear for women addresses everyday, active life — clothing for women who move, work and do things — rather than occasional or purely formal dress. It is a category defined by the wearer's activity, and building a company on it means designing for how women actually spent their days. The origin is stated as a starting point, not a limit, because the growth that followed carried the firm far beyond that first category while keeping the founding focus on women's real wardrobes as its base.
The firm grew from its origins designing active sportswear for women to a billion-dollar enterprise with a full line of clothing for men and women. Two kinds of growth are recorded in that single sentence. The first is scale: a billion-dollar enterprise is among the largest forms a fashion company can take, reached from a 1976 founding in little more than a decade of trading before her retirement. The second is range: a full line of clothing for men and women replaces a single category for a single audience. A full line means a customer can be dressed across occasions and seasons from one label, and adding men extends that offer to a second audience entirely, doubling the market the same company name can serve.
She retired from active management in 1989. Active management is a careful phrase: it marks the end of her day-to-day running of the company, thirteen years after she founded it, rather than necessarily the end of the company itself, which continued as the billion-dollar enterprise she had built. Read whole, the career has a clear three-part shape. Formation came through art study in Europe after a Brussels birth and a New Orleans upbringing. Mastery came through twenty-five years designing in New York for others. Independence came in 1976 with her own company, beginning in active sportswear for women and growing, within her own period of active management, into a billion-dollar business clothing both men and women. The brevity of the record makes each of those facts carry weight, and together they describe one of the clearest examples of a designer converting long professional experience into a major company of her own — a company that began with one woman's category, active sportswear, and ended her period of management clothing both men and women at billion-dollar scale.
Liz Claiborne was born Elisabeth Claiborne Ortenberg on March 31, 1929 in Brussels, Belgium. She was raised in New Orleans.
After working in New York as a designer for 25 years, she started her own design company, Liz Claiborne, Inc., in 1976. The firm began by designing active sportswear for women.
Liz Claiborne retired from active management in 1989. By then her firm had grown into a billion-dollar enterprise with a full line of clothing for men and women.