Like any good ingenue story, hers begins with a fairy-tale Hollywood discovery. She started off known, in fashion circles, as StaceyPants. Her father ran a textileimporting business, and she'd always been interested in design and color. In the early oughts, fresh out of University of Pennsylvania and working as a Flash Web designer in NYC, she saw a striped upholstery fabric slightly reminiscent of '70s Mick Jagger stagewear in a window and had an epiphany. She wanted pants like that. She made them up in a retro version of the then-dominant Seven jeans style, tight on top, belled at the leg. "I was out in L.A., and I was walking around in the crazy pants," she says, "and I got stopped by Lisa Kline [owner of the eponymous trend-starting boutique] and she said, `I have to have those for my store,' and came over and wrote an order." Bendet Eisner produced 20 pairs and had downtown scenesters such as model Devon Aoki sashay down ad hoc catwalks at the Russian Tea Room. Barneys placed an order, and shortly after, Andrew Rosen, the man behind Theory, offered to help back her business. Alice + Olivia was on.
She and Rosen have never brought in outside investors; the company has grown on its own profits each year. Her feminine, real-world-friendly dresses, leggings, tops, and blazers are spotted on star clotheshorses such as Sienna Miller and Gwyneth Paltrow. Eight hundred outlets carry her line, from Neiman Marcus to Intermix, and she has five freestanding boutiques, with more in the works. This spring, she's launching her Base Collection, a neutral series of black, nude, and white coordinating pieces (high-waisted, carrot-legged trousers with a wide cinch belt; a sleekly fitted, long, stretch T-shirt formalized with shoulder pads) to reflect her current wardrobe needs for fast, functional dressing.
Two years ago, she married Eric Eisner, son of Michael Eisner, the ex–Disney CEO. Her husband, 36, is a budding director with grade-A connections; together they have become movers and shakers in the creativeclass scene. Two months after they got engaged, she got pregnant. They eloped, marrying quietly in Anguilla.
She has the kind of established career, and life, that most of us these days hope to have in our early forties. How did she get so ahead of the game? Maybe it's just because she starts her day early. She gets up at 4:30 a.m. to do an hour of ashtanga practice so she can be back in time to greet her daughter, Eloise (named because Eisner used to say that his wife reminded him of the children's book character who grew up in the Plaza hotel). But although she's highenergy, she doesn't seem harried. When we asked her at the ELLE photo shoot to show off one of her yoga moves, since she was wearing her Alice + Olivia seamless, allpurpose leggings in hot pink, she vaulted into a handstand, then a perfect right-angle arabesque, and held it, smiling, in Balenciaga platforms. She makes it all look easy and incredibly fun.
It's the same approach she takes to interior decorating. Eisner already has a house in Los Angeles, where his work is centered, but they needed an East Coast place near the Alice + Olivia offices. Bendet Eisner found their loft and immediately got the big picture in order. "The place was all sort of brown and beige, which isn't me," she says— wearing, as she speaks, a tulle tutu she's pulled over her leggings. She cleaned up the background so she could add lots of color (her sources of inspiration range from Barbie and Japanese manga to Lichtenstein). Take note, color fiends, as this is a trick that allows for more risk-taking decorating later: "I painted the floor white and stained the IKEA light-wood kitchen cabinets ebony."
With this background, and some tastefully stabilizing furniture such as a Mies van der Rohe chaise, she could fully indulge some favorite decorating habits, like lacquering West Elm shelves in hot pink, or making DIY furniture. She sewed 18 wildly variegated stuffed animals onto a traditional armchair upholstered in black-and-white stripes and created a chandelier out of fabric scraps that hangs from a ceiling wallpapered in black-and-white polka dots.
The whimsy is also balanced by some seriously good art. To pick from, she had her husband's established collection, which included a wonderful series of Claes Oldenburg prints of studies for his giant pop sculptures. (Buying prints is a smart way to get work from established artists you love— prints can start in the low four figures, while original drawings and paintings start in the five and six figures). But Bendet Eisner is also following her own instincts and buying original work from younger artists, such as a drawing by the superhot Chinese Terence Koh for Eloise's playroom.
The overall look of the apartment is functional but funny, fancy but not uptight. Which is quite like Bendet Eisner. She's got that ideal version of drive you hear so much about, from yogis to CEOs, where the point of competition is to challenge yourself, not really to win, but then you win anyway, because your motivation is right. And you know you've won the work-life-balance challenge when career and cocoon are an equal reflection of you, and both prove to be utterly wearable.
