Jeans Therapy
Can Liz Claiborne's Redesigned Pants Boost a Sagging Company?

By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 3, 2007

NEW YORK

In the clothing business, there is no more elusive a dream than creating the perfect pair of pants.

"There's a challenge with every garment, but with pants and jeans you have to go up and down and around," says Richard Ostell, creative director of Liz Claiborne. "Men are generally straight up and down. There are more variations in women's bodies."

Businesses have risen and careers have been launched on a good pair of trousers.

A few years ago, Michael Kors designed a pair of black wool pants that sold for $1,000. For that price, Kors knew "they better have voodoo in them." Apparently they did. He reported selling 300 pairs. Alvin Valley rose to prominence in the past few years as the go-to designer for socialites searching for pants that could make a rear end look perky.

Banana Republic brags about its variety of pant silhouettes. Land's End has been crowing this spring about having pants for everyone from petites to plus sizes. And Eddie Bauer hosted a mini runway presentation recently to show off its new pants selection and boast about an exacting fit. One model after another walked across a blond wood floor to show off the brand's petite cuts, its fuller women's cut, its lower rise, its curve-friendly proportions. A spokeswoman offering narration reassured the audience that there were no "mom jeans" in the collection.

For Liz Claiborne, a failing 31-year-old brand on the hunt to reclaim lost customers, the promise of perfect pants serves as bait.

After swimsuits, pants are the most difficult shopping experience for a woman, notes Pamela Thomas-Graham, group president of Liz Claiborne Inc. She is sitting in the company's 12th floor conference room at its headquarters in the Garment District here. She has spent more than a few hours studying women and their fitting-room adventures and has come to realize that the anguished encounters between a woman and a pair of pants are about much more than a single clothing purchase.

Trousers represent the communication gap between the fashion industry and Everywoman. And "low-rise" is a description fraught with meaning. From the Midwest to the South, women say the same thing: It is a silhouette for teenagers, for starlets, for skinny models. Low-rise jeans are a disavowal of the realities of a woman's body. They are for exhibitionists. They are ridiculous. They . . . are . . . not . . . for . . . me.

"I don't have a lot of hips or a butt, but I have a little tummy," says Adrienne Davis, 45, who used to be a devoted Liz Claiborne customer. "The way the low-rise cuts me there -- " She pauses for an instant and then let's out a howl of disgust: "Eee-yow-ech!"

Virtually every manufacturer in the premium denim market promises customers that its jeans will magically give the appearance of long legs, a high derriere and thin thighs. All many women want are dungarees that won't inadvertently reveal their underwear or accentuate a thick midriff. To this end, these women pass along fit assessments of trouser brands with the urgency of a hot stock tip.

Many shoppers are convinced that the fashion industry just doesn't give a lick about anyone over the age of 25. Those omnipresent low-rise pants are simply the most egregious offenders on a long list of unsympathetic trends. Skinny jeans might be a close second.

"I hate the fashion of today. I'm not even inspired to go into stores," Davis says. "Every woman has had that feeling of 'I know I can't wear that, but I'm going to try it on anyway.' I never feel like that anymore."

For a company like Liz Claiborne, creating a perfect pair of pants is good for business. A reliable fit can inspire rabid customer loyalty. But great pants also send a message to women: You have been heard.

Ostell has been on a listening tour all over the country to meet customers -- both current and lapsed. In Chicago this winter, the company gathered about 75 women from the financial services firm Smith Barney. The women represented all corners of the company, from mailroom workers to portfolio advisers. The fashion house didn't put on a traditional show. There was no catwalk. Instead, it felt almost like a PowerPoint presentation in an auditorium setting with Ostell at a podium and women sharing intimate details about their bodies, their lifestyles and their dressing woes: Their thighs are not lean; their hips are not narrow; their bellies are not flat. "A lot of women feel worn down by buying clothes," Ostell says.

What they're looking for is simple, says Thomas-Graham. They want the beauty of fashion but not the artifice.

The Rise and Fall of Liz

It used to be that women could rely on Liz Claiborne to produce clothes that were fashionable, reasonably priced and classic enough to last more than a few seasons. When the company was founded in 1976, it was known for providing women in their 30s and 40s with career clothes such as mix-and-match separates, tailored jackets and versatile skirts. The collection was never expensive by the standards of designer labels, but the quality fabrics, attention to trends and thoughtful details made it a modestly aspirational brand.

"The 1970s belonged to Liz Claiborne," says Elaine Lieb, 74, who was a longtime customer. "They were work clothes for working women. They were good-looking clothes at a fair price."

"I think that Liz herself was a leading fashion star as much as Chanel and Gucci," says Lieb, who has taught fashion merchandising in New York for 30 years. "People don't believe it because her clothes weren't as high-priced."

Davis, who lives in Michigan and has two children, works in sales -- a job that requires her to maintain a professional polish.

"My fondness for Liz is such that I worked there 10 years ago. I worked in one of their stores," she says. "I am still wearing some of that collection. There are pants I'm so upset about because they have holes in them and they're shiny" because they have been worn so much.

Over the years, the company grew into a nearly $5 billion conglomerate that today includes Juicy Couture, Lucky Brand Dungarees, Mexx, Prana and Kate Spade. But along the way, the flagship label suffered. The company's namesake retired in 1989. The brand relied on a design team, but it lacked a singular voice that could direct every element of an aesthetic vision -- from advertising to store design. By the late 1990s it was turning dowdy and stale and was overrun with pleated jeans, chambray shirts, pastel hues and the kinds of nondescript clothes that make a 20-year-old look matronly. Former customers point out that the brand's exuberant color palette disappeared. It no longer looked contemporary. It was too casual.

"They were no longer conservative. They were frumpy," says Kim Humphreys, 45, a corporate executive who lives in Greensboro, N.C. More than six years ago, she shifted her allegiance from Liz Claiborne to Talbots, Banana Republic and Dockers. Other former customers have gone to Chico's and J. Jill.

Net sales in 2004, for example, decreased by 18.7 percent from the previous year. Dozens of free-standing Liz Claiborne stores have been shuttered. (The brand continues to be sold through its outlet stores and in a steadily decreasing number of department stores.) It was a dying brand.

"I don't even look at Liz now," Davis says. "I probably haven't looked -- I mean really looked -- in two years."

In 2003, Liz Claiborne hired Ostell, who had been the womenswear designer for Nicole Farhi, a high-end British sportswear firm. He worked on the now defunct line Realities, which was a collection of basics under the Liz Claiborne banner. In 2005, he took on responsibility for all Liz Claiborne ready-to-wear. That same year, Thomas-Graham, who previously was chairman of CNBC, was named group president of Liz Claiborne Inc., with the revitalization of the flagship as project No. 1. Each day, her personal wardrobe of Liz Claiborne separates -- from pencil skirts to leather blazers -- serve as a visual news release on the state of the brand. (Earlier this year, "Project Runway's" Tim Gunn was hired as chief creative officer for the corporation to help juice up all the brands.)

"Liz had strayed away from what it was known for," Ostell says. It had become a much more casual line."

Now it has a new advertising campaign that stars a quietly fashionable and almost glamorous 35-year-old model who is also a mother. (The average age of the brand's customer is 41. Its petite customers skew a little older, and plus-size ones are younger.) It has reintroduced Liz Claiborne Collection, a pricier line fueled by trends and spiced with limited edition pieces. It will be sold through larger branches of department stores such as Macy's and on the company Web site.

For fall 2007, the Liz Claiborne Collection includes leather jackets, velvet eyelet tops and a lot less emphasis on pastel colors. There have been upgrades in materials, too -- shifting from PVC handbags to leather ones, for instance. For spring, an embroidered silk georgette dress is $199, a short trench coat is $159 and boot-cut pants with a lower rise are $89.

The brand isn't trying to be trendy. That's not what its customers want. It's just attempting to reclaim a reputation for being contemporary. "I never really think about going after that one customer who is a clotheshorse," Ostell says. "It's a slippery path to go down. You have to think of who the customer is and be true to that."

Retail consultants have identified a sweet spot for which Liz Claiborne should aim. Prices in the designer market have jumped -- a starter designer handbag is now about $1,500. Low-end brands such as Target and H&M have turned their attention to trendy merchandise. There may be room in the middle for clothes that are merely stylish and modestly priced.

"Liz has had such inconsistencies. They need to get to the core of what they really want to do and forget the gimmicks," says Lori Holliday Banks, a trend analyst at the Tobe Report, a retail consultancy.

"Customers want consistency and authenticity."

In company surveys, women in their 30s and older reach back to Jackie Onassis and Audrey Hepburn when asked to name a fashion icon. They are not listing modern starlets.

"I think about my friend Nina: an ex-banker living in the U.K. with three boys. She's married and 41," Ostell says. "I always think of her as being my customer. She's fashionable. She looks great. She goes to the gym, but she's not a stick-thin supermodel. She wants to look fashionable but appropriate. . . . Women are not wanting to look foolish. They don't want to look like mutton dressed as lamb."

That woman, Ostell says, is not going to "trust some airy-fairy designer up there in the clouds."

Sales are no longer in freefall, but they continue to drop. For 2006, the Liz Claiborne brand reported net sales fell by 9 percent compared with 2005. And when the corporate parent reported its first quarter net sales for 2007 earlier this week, they were down by 1.6 percent. Earnings per share were down by 65 percent. The Liz Claiborne brand was fingered as one of the key causes.

Beyond 'Mom Jeans'

As part of the brand's makeover, Ostell reworked the trousers in the Liz Claiborne collection. Was the company harboring "mom jeans" -- notorious high-waisted dungarees with an unfathomable number of pleats and tapered legs that can make even the leanest figure look like a sack of potatoes?

Ostell mutters something unintelligible to himself and then stares at his fingernails. Thomas-Graham goes mute and refuses to make eye contact.

Seven pants silhouettes were winnowed to three: "Kylie," which sits at the natural waist; "Audra," which fits just below the waist; and "Sloane," which has a lower rise.

Notice that the company refers to the "Sloane" pants as having a "lower" rise, not as "low-rise." Semantics, it turns out, are important.

At fit clinics around the country, women were invited to come in with their favorite trousers. Thomas-Graham offers Exhibit A. It is before-and-after photographs of a woman with long, strawberry-blond hair and glasses who looks to be in her 40s. In the before picture, she is wearing her favorite trousers and smiling broadly. The pants are khaki with a multitude of pleats. They are full through the thighs and tapered. They look too large, too baggy and sit so high on her waist that they turn her boyish figure into a large rectangle.

"Throughout all the focus groups, there've been certain constant things," Ostell says. "Every woman says, 'Low-rise? That's my daughter.' And these are women in their 30s and 40s saying this." The women stubbornly refused to believe such pants could ever be flattering.

Ostell encouraged Ms. Exhibit A to try the Sloane pants. Some might say he was reduced to wheedling. The Sloane pants aren't low-rise, after all, just lower.

In the after image, the woman looks neater. Even her posture has improved.

Notes from the fit clinic reveal this:

"Many were surprised that the lower rise hid their problem areas (usually stomach) even better than a higher-waisted, pleated pant."

"Many noted that actually the wider waistband made the pants fit comfortably and prevented their stomach from rolling over."

Along the way, the company also learned that while their customers loved slim-fitting jeans, they wouldn't give anything called "skinny" a second glance.

If the company took away anything from its conversations with customers, it was that "women want fashion in their lives, but they're confused about how to do that," says Thomas-Graham.

Liz Claiborne is also betting that they'll want a perfect pair of pants.