Liz Claiborne, who died Tuesday at 78, clothed a rising generation of women in the workplace and rode her company from a quarter million-dollar startup in 1977 to a place in the Fortune 500 top industrial companies, in less than a decade.

Abjuring the navy blue suit and bowtie that then constituted the working woman’s uniform, she substituted a more playful and feminine vision with a fashion sense developed in more than two decades as a top Seventh Avenue designer.

Claiborne liked to say that she designed for the “Liz lady,” a professional woman not unlike herself who wanted to afford new clothes each year in a variety of colors and styles. Among her early successes were velour blouses and culottes. Her mix-and-match collections appealed to on-the-go working women.

Instead of designing high-end couture, Claiborne stuck to a burgeoning middle market. “My customer is the working woman,” she told the New York Times in 1980. “She has no choice — clothes are not a variable for her. She needs a wardrobe and she’s more financially independent.”

Claiborne was born in Brussels, Belgium, but was descended from an old New Orleans family whose patriarch had been governor of Louisiana during the War of 1812. She grew up touring cathedrals and speaking French, but the outbreak of World War II sent her family home. Her father — a Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. banker — had an old-fashioned sense of pedagogy that did not include college, and the family was “dead set” against it when she announced that she would enter the fashion business, she told Esquire in 1986.

Determined to make her own way, she won a national design contest sponsored by Harper’s Bazaar in 1950 and moved to New York, where at 21 she found work as a “sketcher and pick-up-pins girl,” as she liked to say. Glamorous to boot, she also found work as a model.

Her time in Europe surely had an influence. “Europeans have a more careful sense of the visual than Americans,” she told Esquire. “Americans might put a paper carton of milk on the table. Europeans would pour the milk into a pitcher and put the pitcher on the table.”

After holding apprentice positions with Tina Leser, Ben Reig, and Omar Kiam during the 1950s, Claiborne took a designer’s job at Juniorite, where she became well-known as a dress designer (despite herself favoring slacks). During a stint at the Rhea Manufacturing Company, she met Arthur Ortenberg, a fashion industry veteran, and soon thereafter both got divorces. They were married in 1957.

Starting in 1960, Claiborne worked at the Youth Guild division of Jonathan Logan, a dress manufacturer. She stayed there until the mid-1970s, when the company folded. Her son, Alexander Schultz, and her husband’s children were by then in college. The couple decided to go into the fashion business for themselves, along with a handful of other clothing industry veterans who became the firm’s top management.

Using $50,000 in savings and $200,000 raised from friends and relatives, Liz Claiborne Inc. became profitable in its first year, 1976, with net shipments of $7.5 million. Early successes included a velour peasant blouse and a crepe de chine version a season later, each of which sold nearly quadruple its original 4,000 production run. Sales tripled by 1978, to $23 million, and continued on a meteoric arc, culminating in $1.2 billion in sales in 1986, the year the firm entered the Fortune 500. It was among the first-ever on the list founded by a woman, and among the youngest.

Easily surpassing her more established but higher-priced rivals, Liz Claiborne became a byword for affordable women’s fashion nationally. In addition to breaking new ground in fashion, the firm was an innovator in responsive marketing, keeping close tabs on changing preferences for color and style and helping design its department store displays to appeal to professional women without time to linger. By some estimates, the company controlled one-third of the women’s upscale sportswear market in the late 1980s.

Claiborne retired from the company in 1989 and professed not much affection for her company’s designs in recent years. She said she preferred to wear DKNY.

The Claiborne line languished and was often discounted, but the company prospered with sales under more than 20 other brands, including Ellen Tracy, Dana Buchman, and Juicy Couture. Last year, it had sales of almost $5 billion.

Claiborne retired to a ranch near Helena, Mont., where she supported groups discouraging domestic violence and building bird sanctuaries. From 1991 to 1994, she and her husband sponsored a 350-mile sled-dog race, the Race to the Sky.

Anne Elisabeth Jane Claiborne
Born March 31, 1929, in Brussels; died June 26 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital of cancer; survived by her husband, Arthur Ortenberg; her son, Alexander Schultz, Mr. Ortenberg’s children, Neil and Nancy, and a grandson.