Liz Claiborne Profiles

Liz Claiborne — Anne Elisabeth Jane Claiborne — was a Belgian-born American fashion designer and businesswoman. Her success was built upon stylish yet affordable apparel for career women, featuring colorfully tailored separates that could be mixed and matched; she 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. This profiles page tells the career in order. Of all the pages in this series, this is the one the others depend on.

The biography searches in the references gather the wider career coverage, and the brand's official website is linked there as well. The collections, runway and news pages in this series file the fashion work the life produced.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

Brussels, New Orleans and the Design Rooms

She was born in Brussels on March 31, 1929, to American parents, and raised largely in New Orleans. Art study in Belgium and France came first; fashion followed when she won a design contest and moved to New York, where she spent years learning the trade inside other people's houses — pattern work and design rooms, including a long tenure at Youth Guild and work at Dan Keller. By the mid-1970s she knew exactly which customer the industry was underserving: the professional woman, newly arriving in offices in large numbers, who needed a wardrobe that worked as hard as she did.

The established houses dressed that woman in cautious, expensive suits or in junior clothes that fit neither her life nor her rank. Claiborne's answer — designed separates in coordinated colors, at prices a working woman could reach — was an idea whose moment had plainly come.

1976: Her Own Name, and the Fortune 500

In 1976 she co-founded Liz Claiborne Inc. with her husband Art Ortenberg and partners Leonard Boxer and Jerome Chazen. The system was the product: jackets, knit tops, blouses and skirts in families of color and fabric, displayed together in department-store shops so customers could build outfits piece by piece across a season and across a paycheck. Working women adopted it completely, and the company grew at a pace the industry had rarely seen — public in 1981, and in 1986 the first company founded by a woman to join the Fortune 500.

She retired in 1989; the company she founded grew into a multi-brand group carrying her name long after. She died on June 26, 2007. Read with the collections page, the profile completes its arc: a designer trained in other houses' back rooms who understood, earlier than any of them, that the American career woman was fashion's great new customer — and built her a wardrobe system to prove it.