Liz Claiborne
American sportswear pioneer with an accessible 1980s fragrance legacy.
Liz Claiborne began in 1976 as a New York sportswear label founded by Belgian-born designer Anne Elisabeth Jane Claiborne, her husband Art Ortenberg, and partners Leonard Boxer and Jerome Chazen. The company was built around affordable, polished separates for women entering the professional workforce, and in 1986 became the first Fortune 500 company founded by a woman. The fragrance line opened the same year with Liz Claiborne for Women in its distinctive triangular flacon — a softly powdery floral that became a lasting reference for late-1980s American department-store perfumery. Claiborne for men followed in 1989, and the wider portfolio later grew to include Curve, Realities, and others. The perfume rights were sold to Elizabeth Arden in 2008, and the apparel brand has since passed to Authentic Brands Group. The fragrances remain in production at accessible tier and trade heavily on nostalgia rather than current creative direction.
DNA over time
Each column is an era. Each colored band shows that family’s share of accord weight across every perfume the house released in that window. Bigger band = the house leaned harder on that family.
