MAY 2019 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 29
WHOLLY MOLI
LIZ CLAIBORNE
FASHION’S SEACHANGE MAKER
BY TIMOTHY BOLGER
After founding her pioneering,
eponymous company that made her
a breakout fashion star in 1976, style
icon Liz Claiborne, seeking to draw
inspiration from the beach, bought a
home in Saltaire on Fire Island.
Her need for the ocean’s recharging
benefits was apparent, given her
meteoric rise. Five years after she
founded the company with her textile
titan husband, Arthur Ortenberg, it
went public. A year after she bought
her beach house in 1985, Liz Claiborne
became the first Fortune 500 company
founded by a to have a female CEO
make the list. It was also one of the
youngest companies to ever make
the cut — a testament to her business
acumen.
“I wanted to dress busy and active
women like myself — women who
dress in a rush and who weren't
perfect,” Claiborne told Women's
Wear Daily. “The concept was to
dress the American working woman
because I, as a working woman
with a child, didn't want to spend
hours shopping. Things should be
easy.”
At the time, the approach to “bring
good taste to a mass level” was
groundbreaking not only because
the brand made affordable business
attire at a time when women
were increasingly entering the
workforce. But the company also
broke the mold from fashion industry
norms, rolling out new designs
every two months instead of four
times annually with the change of
the seasons, as is customary.
As a successful, trailblazing female
CEO, Claiborne, known for her
short-cropped hair and oversized
eyeglasses, personified the working
women that she had in mind in
her designs. She was known to
sometimes travel to three cities
in a day to promote a new line
and would go undercover as a
salesperson to learn firsthand
how customers felt about her
clothes.
By the time she retired in 1990,
she had grown the company
into the nation’s largest women’s
apparel maker, with $1.4
billion in sales. After spending
her retirement dedicated to
environmental philanthropy,
she died of cancer in 2007.
Longtime Saltaire resident
Hugh O’Brien wrote that although
she and her husband’s
primary residence was in Manhattan,
“it was here that they felt
most at home, the place where
they came to recover their spirits
and peace of mind, away from
the pressures of the world.”
Liz Claiborne spent her down time on Fire
Island.
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