Liz Claiborne

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Anne Elisabeth Jane Claiborne (March 31, 1929 – June 26, 2007) was an American fashion designer and businesswoman.

Her popularity was based on fashionable yet affordable clothing for career women, which included vibrantly printed separates that could be mixed and matched.

Claiborne is best known for co-founding Liz Claiborne Inc., which in 1986 became the first company to be listed on the Fortune 500 list.

Claiborne was the first female to serve as chair and CEO of a Fortune 500 firm.

Early life and education

Claiborne was born in Brussels to American parents. She descended on a wealthy Louisiana family with an ancestor, William C. C. Claiborne, who served as Louisiana's first governor after statehood during the 1812 war.

The family returned to New Orleans in 1939, at the beginning of World War II. Claiborne attended St. Timothy's School for Girls, a small boarding school that then operated in Catonsville, Maryland, and now in Stevenson, Maryland. In Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, she and her siblings attended Mountain Lakes High School.

Claiborne went to Europe to study art in painters' studios rather than finishing high school. Her father was convinced that she needed an education, so she studied art informally.

Personal life, retirement, and death

Claiborne's first marriage was to Ben Shultz, but it ended in divorce in 1954 after she met Arthur Ortenberg. Arthur (1926 - 2014), she and her now coworker, Arthur, married in 1957. She had a son from her first marriage, Alexander G. Shultz, and two stepchildren from her second marriage, Neil Ortenberg and Nancy Ortenberg.

Claiborne retired from active management in 1989. By that time, she had acquired other businesses, including Kayser-Roth, which made Liz Claiborne accessories. Her husband died at the same time, leaving the other founders as the active managers.

Claiborne and Ortenberg established a foundation in retirement that gave millions of dollars to environmental causes, including funding the television series Nature on PBS and nature conservancy projects around the world. The Rhode Island School of Design awarded her an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts.

Claiborne's mother had been told in May 1997 that she had a rare form of cancer affecting the abdomen's lining. She died of the disease on June 26, 2007, at the age of 78.

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Career

Claiborne won the Jacques Heim National Design Contest (sponsored by Harper's Bazaar) in 1949, then moved to Manhattan, where she spent years as a sketch artist at Tina Leser, the sportswear manufacturer. Omar Kiam, a former Hollywood costume designer-turned-fashion designer, worked with her. She worked as a fashion designer for the Dan Keller and Youth Group Inc. fashion brands.

Claiborne became dissatisfied with the company's inability to produce practical clothes for working women, so she formed Liz Claiborne Inc. in 1976, with husband Art Ortenberg, Leonard Boxer, and Jerome Chazen. It was an immediate success, with sales of $2 million in 1976 and $23 million in 1978. It had accounted for one-third of the American women's upscale sportswear industry by 1988.

Claiborne's marketing plans changed the nature of retail stores. Claiborne, for example, requested that her line of clothing be displayed separately, as a department and including all of the items she sold. In one location of a department store, this was the first time customers were able to browse several styles of clothing by brand name alone. In modern shops, the common pattern for the grouping of special brands has emerged.

Liz Claiborne Accessories was founded in 1980 by employee Nina McLemore (who decades later would debut a brand of her own in 2001). Liz Claiborne Inc. went public in 1981 and made the Fortune 500 list in 1986 with retail sales of $1.2 billion.

Claiborne's corporate directory was alphabetically ordered to avoid what she perceived as male hierarchies. She ruled meetings by ringing a glass bell and becoming well-known for her love of red, "Liz Red." She would often dress as a saleswoman to see what average women think of her clothes.

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Awards and honors

• 1990 - National Business Hall of Fame, sponsored by Junior Achievement
• 1991 - National Sales Hall of Fame
• 1991 - Honorary Doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design
• 1993 - Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
• 2000 - Council of Fashion Designers of America Lifetime Achievement Award