Liz Claiborne Biography
Anne Elisabeth Jane "Liz" Claiborne (1929 – 2007) was a Belgian fashion designer, founder of the Liz Claiborne Inc. brand which in 1986 was the first company founded by a woman to enter the Fortune 500.
Liz Claiborne was born in Brussels to American parents. With the outbreak of the Second World War, however, the family returned to New Orleans, where Liz Claiborne began her studies, but did not finish to move to Europe and study painting. In 1949, he won the Jacques Heim National Design Contest, sponsored by Harper's Bazaar, and moved to New York, where he worked for years in the Garment District on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan as a designer at the sportswear house Tina Leser. In 1976, after the bankruptcy of the company she worked for, Liz Claiborne founded her own company, Liz Claiborne Inc.; she saw the need for more comfortable professional clothing for working women. By 1988 the brand took over a third of the American high-end women's sportswear market. In 1989, Claiborne retired from the business and dedicated herself to a foundation, created to raise funds for ecological causes. On June 26, 2007, she died at the age of seventy-eight after a long battle with cancer.
