Anne Elisabeth Jane Claiborne (March 31, 1929 – June 26, 2007) was an 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. Claiborne co-founded Liz Claiborne Inc., which in 1986 became the first company founded by a woman to make the Fortune 500 list.[1] Claiborne was the first woman to become chair and CEO of a Fortune 500 company.[2]
Rather than finishing high school, Claiborne went to Europe to study art in the studios of painters.[4] Her father did not believe that she needed an education, so she studied art informally.[4]
Claiborne became frustrated by the failure of the companies that employed her to provide practical clothes for working women, so, with husband Art Ortenberg, Leonard Boxer, and Jerome Chazen, she launched her own design company, Liz Claiborne Inc., in 1976.[1] It was an immediate success, with sales of $2 million in 1976 and $23 million in 1978.[7] By 1988, it had acquired one-third of the American women's upscale sportswear market.[4]
Marketing strategies that Claiborne developed changed the nature of retail stores. For example, Claiborne insisted that her line of clothing be displayed separately, as a department to itself and including all of the items she offered. This was the first time customers were able to select many types of clothing articles by brand name alone in one location of a department store. That tradition for the grouping of special brands has become the typical arrangement for name brands in contemporary stores.[8]
In 1980, Liz Claiborne Accessories was founded through employee Nina McLemore (who decades later would launch a label of her own, in 2001).[9] Liz Claiborne Inc. went public in 1981 and made the Fortune 500 list in 1986 with retail sales of $1.2 billion.[7]
Claiborne listed all employees in her corporate directory in alphabetical order, to circumvent what she perceived as male hierarchies.[4] She controlled meetings by ringing a glass bell and became famous for her love of red—"Liz Red".[4] She would sometimes pose as a saleswoman to see what average women thought of her clothes.[4]
Personal life, retirement, and death
Claiborne's first marriage was to Ben Shultz; it ended in divorce in 1954, after she met Arthur Ortenberg.[10] In 1957, she and her then co-worker, Arthur (1926 - 2014) married.[11] She had a son from her first marriage, Alexander G. Shultz, and two stepchildren from her second marriage, Neil Ortenberg and Nancy Ortenberg.[1][12]
Claiborne retired from active management in 1989. By that stage, she had acquired other companies including Kayser-Roth, which produced Liz Claiborne accessories.[1] Her husband retired at the same time, leaving the other founders as the active managers.
Claiborne was advised in May 1997 that she had a rare form of cancer affecting the lining of the abdomen.[12] She died of the cancer on June 26, 2007, at the age of 78.[13]
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
^Ortenberg, Art. Liz Claiborne: The Legend, The Woman, p. 25. Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. ISBN9781589794948. Accessed April 17, 2023. "And then we moved to Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. That's down the road from Morristown. I did sort of go through primary and secondary schooling, though only until my sophomore year..."
Chazen, Jerome A. "Notes from the apparel industry: Two decades at Liz Claiborne." Columbia Journal of World Business 31.2 (1996): 40–43.
Dalby, Jill S., and M. Therese Flaherty. "Liz Claiborne, Inc. and Ruentex Industries, Ltd." Harvard Business School, Case 9 (1990): 690–748.
Daria, Irene. The Fashion Cycle: A Behind the Scenes Look at a Year with Bill Blass, Liz Claiborne, Donna Karan, Arnold Scaasi, and Adrienne Vittadini (Simon and Schuster, 1990).
Siggelkow, Nicolaj. "Change in the presence of fit: The rise, the fall, and the renaissance of Liz Claiborne." Academy of Management Journal 44.4 (2001): 838–857. Highly influential article online.
