Profile of Liz Claiborne: The fashion revolutionary who dressed the working woman

Liz Claiborne was not only an effective businesswoman (the first woman to run a Fortune 500 company), she was also a talented designer who revolutionised the wardrobe of the working woman.

Liz Claiborne, who died last month at the age of 78, was the first woman to found a Fortune 500 company and she did it in a record 11 years. But her importance goes much further than that. A fashion revolutionary, arguably as influential as Coco Chanel, she gave career women confidence in the office. "She grasped exactly what American women needed as the aproned housewife of the 1950s morphed into the professional of the 1970s," says The Economist. Asked how she had grown a 35-piece collection into a $5bn powerhouse, she replied: "I listened to the customer."

When women began entering the workplace en masse in the 1970s they faced a stark sartorial choice, says The Guardian: wear the mannish "uniform" of skirted suit and tailored shirt, which had dominated since the shirtwaist blouse was first mass-produced in Manhattan in the 1890s; or risk being labelled ditzy. But Claiborne made clothes that reflected the changes in women's lives. A working mother, she designed stylish, colourful ranges that could be plucked from hangers at speed. A measure of her success is that the genres she pioneered are now retail clichs: "mix-and-match" separates, "from work-to-evening" and so on. Claiborne had the tailoring skills and artistic eye to design couture. But she wasn't interested in that. As she told Women's Wear Daily: "The concept was to dress the American working woman." That meant paying as much attention to clothes that wouldn't rumple or stain as to creating sassier styles. The key word was "effortless".

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