History
Founded in 1976 by Liz Claiborne, Art Ortenberg, Leonard Boxer, and Jerome Chazen. It was an immediate success with sales of $2 million in 1976 and $23 million in 1978. In 1980, Nina McLemore founded Liz Claiborne Accessories. Liz Claiborne Inc. went public in 1981 and had made the Fortune 500 in 1986, ten years after it was founded with retail sales of $1.2 billion. It was the first company founded by a woman to be listed in the Fortune 500.
Liz Claiborne was also the first designer to insist that her collection be placed together on the department store floor, instead of in separate clothing categories, which changed the way we shop. Shoppers no longer went from shirt department to pant department to coordinate an outfit. They were able to mix and match pieces from the Liz Claiborne collection to create entire outfits. This revolutionized the way department stores arranged clothing for sale and created the role of fashion merchandising as we know it today. Claiborne died on June 26, 2007, at the age of 78 from complications from cancer.
On May 15, 2012, Liz Claiborne Inc. officially became Fifth & Pacific, Inc. and shifted focus to three brands – Juicy Couture, kate spade, and Lucky Brand Jeans. The new name also marked a transition to a direct-to-consumer retailer after decades primarily serving department stores. The new name also reflected the sale of the Liz Claiborne namesake brand to JC Penney Co. in October 2011, as well as other transactions.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)