Elisabeth Claiborne

For twenty years before her name was on a building, Anne Elisabeth Jane Claiborne worked in the back rooms of Seventh Avenue, sketching dresses for other people's labels and watching the bosses ignore the customer she knew best, herself ^[1][2]. She was a working mother who hated to shop, who could not find clothes that were professional without being severe, and who grew certain that millions of American women, pouring into offices in the 1970s, felt the same way ^[2][4]. When the junior-dress house she ran design for would not let her build a line of coordinated, mix-and-match separates, she did something almost no woman her age did in 1976: at forty-six, she quit and bet her savings on the idea ^[1][2].

Liz Claiborne Inc. was incorporated in January 1976 with roughly $250,000, about $50,000 of the couple's own savings and some $200,000 borrowed from friends and family, and a four-person partnership: Claiborne as designer, her husband Arthur Ortenberg running operations, Leonard Boxer handling production, and Jerome Chazen, who joined within the year, running sales ^[1][3][5]. The premise was deceptively simple. She did not design for the runway or the fashion editor; she designed for a specific woman she could picture closing her eyes, the lawyer, the teacher, the bank officer, and she made clothes that woman could buy as separates, mix into many outfits, and wear straight from store to office ^[4][6]. "Businesslike, but not too pinstripe," was how the look was described, "more casual, more imaginative, less uptight" ^[2].

The market answered immediately. First-year sales topped $2 million; by 1978 they had jumped to roughly $23 million ^[1][5]. The company went public in 1981 at $19 a share on net income of about $10 million against $117 million in sales ^[1][5][7]. Then came the milestone that made her a business-history figure: in 1986 Liz Claiborne Inc. became the first company founded by a woman to crack the Fortune 500, and Claiborne, chairman and CEO, became the first woman to run a Fortune 500 company she had built ^[3][5][7]. By the time she stepped back, the firm was the largest women's apparel maker in America with sales above $1.2 billion ^[5][7].

The genius was not only in the clothes. Claiborne and her partners refused to chase discounters or mark merchandise down, only about five percent of goods were ever discounted, against an industry norm near fifteen, and they sold through department stores in dedicated, color-coordinated "concept" displays that taught the customer to buy the whole wardrobe at once ^[5][6]. They eschewed splashy consumer advertising for more than a decade, letting the product and the retail relationships do the work ^[5]. And they built early information systems to read the selling floor in near-real time, so the company manufactured what was actually moving rather than what a designer guessed would ^[6].

Claiborne was, in the words that followed her everywhere, the "reluctant revolutionary", a private, exacting woman who disliked celebrity, did not hold runway shows in the conventional way, and insisted she was a merchant serving a customer rather than an artist serving herself ^[2][6]. In 1989 she and Ortenberg walked away from active management at the top, leaving a billion-dollar company to professional managers, and turned to a second life funding wildlife conservation through their foundation ^[1][2]. She had not invented sportswear or separates; she had understood, earlier and more completely than anyone, that the American workplace had just acquired tens of millions of new women, and that nobody was dressing them ^[2][7].

She was born Anne Elisabeth Jane Claiborne in Brussels on March 31, 1929, the youngest of three children of Omer Villere Claiborne, an American banker posted to Belgium, and his wife Louise ^[2][6]. The family was old New Orleans Creole stock, descended from the line that gave Louisiana its first American governor, William C. C. Claiborne, and Elisabeth grew up bilingual, learning French before English and absorbing a sense, as her husband later put it, that privilege carried responsibilities ^[2][6]. Her father disapproved of formal schooling for girls and steered her toward art; she never finished high school, studying painting instead in Brussels in 1947 and in Nice the following year ^[6].

In 1949, still a teenager in ambition if not in years, she entered and won a national design contest sponsored by Harper's Bazaar, the Jacques Heim award, and used it as her ticket to New York's garment district ^[1][6]. There she spent the 1950s and 1960s in apprenticeship to the trade: a sketch artist and sometime fit model at the sportswear house of Tina Leser, then, from 1960, the chief designer for the junior-dress division of Jonathan Logan, one of the giants of Seventh Avenue ^[1][6]. For fifteen years she designed there, and for fifteen years she chafed, convinced that the company was missing the woman she saw all around her, the one who needed practical, coordinated separates, not frilly-bowed blouses or stiff little suits ^[6].

Her personal life ran alongside the work. A first marriage in 1950 to Ben Schultz ended in divorce and produced her only child, a son, Alexander ^[6]. In 1957 she married Arthur Ortenberg, a textiles executive who would become her life and business partner; for years they saved toward the company they meant to build together, and in 1976, with their children grown enough and the savings sufficient, they finally jumped ^[1][6].

Liz Claiborne's monument is partly statistical and partly cultural. The statistic is unambiguous: in 1986 hers became the first company founded by a woman to reach the Fortune 500, and she became the first woman to chair and run such a company that she had built from nothing, a ceiling broken by a back-room designer who never finished high school ^[3][5][7]. The cultural legacy is larger. She gave a name and a wardrobe to the American working woman at the precise moment that woman was arriving in offices by the millions, and in doing so helped define what 'career dressing' would mean for a generation ^[2][7].

Her business methods proved as influential as her clothes. The coordinated-separates concept, the disciplined refusal to discount, the dedicated in-store shops, and the early use of point-of-sale feedback to drive manufacturing became standard teaching in the apparel trade and the subject of Harvard Business School cases ^[6]. Competitors copied the formula; few matched the consistency ^[5][6].

In retirement she and Ortenberg redirected their fortune toward wildlife and wild-lands conservation through their foundation, funding fieldwork from the American West to Africa, before her death from cancer in 2007 ^[1][2]. The brand outlived her ownership, passing through corporate hands and licenses, but the figure who matters to business history is the one who, at forty-six, looked at an industry that would not dress her and decided to do it herself ^[2][7].