LISA EISNER, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Eisner, of course, is not your average grandmother. With a storied career that includes stints as a magazine editor, photographer and book publisher, her interest in Snoopy is more avant-garde. She tells me about the cult book Snoopy in Fashion, a rare coffee table tome that features Snoopy and his sister Belle in fashion looks: Castelbajac, Kenzo, Issey Miyake. Over the course of our hour-long conversation, this was one of more than a dozen books, documentaries, exhibits, or artists I wrote down. Eisner's mental archive runs deep. "Whatever I'm doing, I kind of just dive in.”

Well beyond Snoopy, Eisner is an epic collector with vast and varied interests. "Unfortunately, my collection is out of hand and I never let go," she says with a laugh. "I just keep collecting, and my husband's ready to kill me." In her Bel-Air home, where she has lived for four decades with said husband, Eric Eisner, here are a few of the things she keeps: piles of archival Hugh Hefner photographs, Shriner china ("with the face of a beat-up Shriner"), rocks and crystals, stacks of old textiles, embroidered coats, and anything cowboy or Native American. She's attracted to bygone craftsmanship. "Anything that seems like you can feel the hand.” She's the first to admit that her piles are less than organized. "They call me Explosion Eisner," she laughs. "There is no method to my madness … After this many years of collecting, I'm bursting at the seams."

Eisner's professed hoarding, however superfluous, has been an integral part of her autodidactic life and career. Her stockpiles serve as an unorthodox form of education. She says as much about her pieces from favorite jewelry designers, like Art Smith and Charles Loloma: "Having those references where you get to really study what they do and how they do it… It's kind of my school."

Like her archive, Eisner's life is jam-packed with experience. Many have pointed out that she was a multi-hyphenate before it was a buzzword. Her eclectic career seems intuitive, led by gut and timing. Eisner tells me she's gained something from each chapter of her life. "At some point you do a million things, and it's like you're making this casserole. You put all these ingredients in, and then you finally go, 'Oh, I see. All these ingredients are going to make this delicious tuna casserole.'"

Eisner grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a place that her former boss, Ralph Lauren, described as "the ugliest town he'd ever seen.” She notes that, "it wasn't exactly a hotbed of fashion," but remembers her father as an early style influence. "My dad was a very cool cat and sort of stylish. He was head of tourism in Wyoming. They used to call him Mr. Wyoming." Cheyenne was home to Cheyenne Frontier Days, the biggest rodeo in the country at the time. Eisner saw herself as a tomboy, but she was entranced by the glamorous rodeo queens. "I just remember these lights of reflection of their sequins and their accessories and their eyelashes and their makeup. They were accessorized to death. They were so girly and I was so not that, but they were mesmerizing… I think that was the first time where lightning struck and I thought, 'Wow, I really like accessories.'"

After two years at the University of Wyoming, where she wrote a "ridiculous" fashion column for the school’s paper, she moved to New York. A friend had been crowned America's Junior Miss ("the biggest thing that ever happened in the history of Wyoming," she jokes) and was scheduled to appear on the soap opera Ryan's Hope. Eisner enrolled at the now-defunct fashion career college Tobé-Coburn. "The draw was that it was on chic Madison Avenue next to the Yves Saint Laurent boutique," she remembers. "And you got two work periods." Eisner took a job at Macy's in Herald Square, thinking she'd learn retail and open a store out West; however her plan unraveled. "It was a nightmare," she says. "They had a Nathan's Hot Dogs, and I just remember eating hot dogs and being miserable." After some trial and error, she landed in an assistant job at Mademoiselle magazine.

Mademoiselle miraculously agreed to let her try Paris, with a guarantee that she could return to her job within three months. She moved across the Atlantic without learning the native language. The Parisians spoke English to her anyway; "they didn't want to be tortured by my bad French." She couch-surfed for "two months and twenty-nine days" before landing a gig at Vogue assisting Susan Train. Her job was to cover young designers: like Gaultier, Mugler and Montana at the time, and the emerging Japanese brands, Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto. She describes it as a dream. "All the photographers would use our office just as their own… Avedon and Penn and Bill King and all those guys were shooting… I was so happy to schlep anything just to be in that orbit."

After three years, she felt an itch to return stateside. "Am I going to live here for the rest of my life or am I just too American?" she thought. She returned to New York and began working for Ralph Lauren, well before the company became the sprawling behemoth of today. "They were on 44th Street, and this was before they had anything fancy… Women's, men's and home were all on the same tiny floor." As part of a microscopic team, Eisner's job was a little bit of everything. She remembers it as fantastic and fast-paced. "You work your asses off. You didn't really have lunch, and you just didn't go home till whatever. If it was ten o'clock at night, that's how it was," she says. "But I feel like I really learned a ton from them. They taught you how to find a needle in a haystack. They taught you how to go to flea markets. They taught you how to edit and look at something vintage and see if there's something great."

It was while she was working at Ralph Lauren that she was set up with her future husband. Eric was LA-based, and she was reluctant to join him but eventually relented. "We got engaged six months after we met… So things went really fast," she says. "Of course, every fashion person thought LA was the tackiest, most horrible place ever." In LA, Eisner spent some time as Vogue's West Coast editor. She dabbled in styling but didn't like it. "I could only give [the talent] my style, which only works on me and no one else." Eventually, she felt an urge to go in her own direction.

"I was always interested in grassroots fashion or people with style that weren't influenced by anything in fashion, but just had some innate thing," she says. She had been obsessed with photography and thought of trying it herself. By then she was a mother and was taking pictures of her kids. "I thought, wait a minute… I want to be a documentary photographer. I don't want to do this fantasy thing."

Again she dove in headfirst, buying a Hasselblad and learning on the job. She wanted to shoot something she knew and thought back to the rodeo queens of her childhood. This was an era before social media. "The Western way of life [was] like its own planet. It's a certain way of talking, a certain music, a certain thing you eat, a certain way you dress. They're not looking at fashion magazines or any of it. They don't give a shit."

Eisner spent seven years as a fly on the wall documenting rodeo pageants across the country. "I was from Wyoming, and so that was an in for me," she says. Her images eventually became the iconic photography book Rodeo Girl, published by Greybull Press, the outfit she co-founded in 1998 with her friend, Roman Alonso. "I was really into photography and books, and we were kind of like, 'Let's do the numbers … Okay, well, according to us, this could really work.'" Rodeo Girl was an influential industry hit. "All of a sudden I got a call from Arianne Phillips," Eisner remembers. "She said, 'I'm working on this Madonna shoot. She's trying to figure out her new image. Someone showed her this book, and we think it's perfect.'" Eisner’s rodeo girls became the blueprint for Madonna’s early 2000s cowgirl era – most memorably, in her music video for the single Don’t Tell Me. Greybull published one or two books a year for a decade. "Every photographer wants a book," she says of the opportunity, "and a lot of photographers had shitty books." Eisner and Alonso dove deep into photographers' archives and worked with established art directors like Doug Lloyd and Lorraine Wild. "We did that for a long time until all of a sudden it was no longer business."

I am struck, at this point, by Eisner's apparently fearless embrace of adventure and change. Does she ever get intimidated when starting something new? "Oh my God, so intimidated," she says, "and always working extra hard to learn more and more, because I don't feel like I had that education. But, I had a drive and a will, and I wanted to learn. Maybe that's the most important thing anyway, just how much do you want it? How much do you want to learn?" She admits that after years of working to execute the vision of others, she felt vulnerable, at first, putting her own name on things. In time she’s found her footing. "Now I feel really good that I can do that. I say, 'Okay, it's just a moment in time, and this is my message right now, and that's it.'" "I still feel like I don't know anything… And I do get intimidated. But that's also part of the game, is learning how to not be messed up from it."

Lisa Eisner's latest chapter as a jewelry designer began in 2014. "I've always collected jewelry, and my husband was like, 'I can't believe you're not going to design. You really should design jewelry,'" she says. Looking back, this career move reads less like a leap than a convergence. Years of collecting and studying other makers had trained her eye, and every earlier job had trained a different skill: the hunt for a needle in a haystack at Ralph Lauren, the editing she did as a publisher, the vision of a photographer. Tina Chow, a friend from her early LA years, was the first person she knew who cared about the power of stones, and she is a big reason Eisner got into them. "Everything came together in this nice little package to help me design jewelry," she says. "I've used all of it and continue to use all of it."

Eisner’s longtime friend, Tom Ford, was another early supporter of her jewelry. He was so taken by her designs that he asked her to create pieces for two of his collections in 2015. Eisner, of course, had long been something of a muse to Ford, walking the runway for the first collection for his eponymous brand’s Spring 2011 show and attending the Met Gala with him in 2003 (she would sit at his table again in 2026). Her jewelry also appeared in Ford’s neo-noir thriller, Nocturnal Animals.

The pieces, oriented around stones and organic shapes, are deeply personal, and finding the material is its own pursuit. "I didn't ever want to just do turquoise and silver because Native Americans have that covered and they're so good," she says. Her turquoise has to be American. "There's lots of different turquoise all over the world that is beautiful, but for me, it's sentimental and it's personal." Because so many of the mines have closed, she describes herself as “a hunter-gatherer," tracking down lapidary guys sitting on stashes of old turquoise and making trips to Tucson. She is drawn to copper mines for their blues and greens, and to black jade from Wyoming. Her gold nugget pieces are inspired by her grandfather, who ran a Ford Lincoln Mercury dealership in Wyoming. "He was the first male that I knew that actually wore jewelry," she says, remembering his gold cuff links and nugget tie bar. Nothing is off the rack. "A lot of it's bespoke," she says. "It might be a similar style, but the stone is completely different. I kind of think that people want unique clothes. I certainly do, so that's what I try to do." Nature, she adds, is her main source of inspiration, and she is working on a book that pairs her jewelry with her garden of forty years. "I think when anything becomes personal, then you have your whole self, your whole body, you have everything in it."

At nearly seventy, Eisner's life continues to be all about abundance, and not just an abundance of stuff. She is still hunting and learning and still unable to part with the smallest finds. “The littlest things, I'm like, ‘Oh no, I can't give that away. You know how hard that was to find? You're never going to find that again.’"