This past April, Eleanor Lambert hailed a taxi with a friend and started to cry when she noticed its number. She immediately FaceTimed her mom, then explained to the driver why she was so emotional.
“I said, ‘It’s so funny, my grandfather used to drive this cab around,’ ” Lambert recalls. “And he said, ‘You know what, that’s hilarious. One day I was Googling and found that Diane Lane’s dad use to drive this cab.’ I was like, ‘That’s who I’m talking about!’ I was on cloud a billion for the rest of the week.”
Growing up in LA, the 24-year-old daughter of actress Diane Lane and actor Christopher Lambert didn’t spend too much time riding around in yellow cabs. (Her grandfather, Burt, died in 2002, when she was 8.) But that changed in 2011, when Lambert moved to NYC to attend New York University, where she majored in journalism.
Both mother and daughter see the taxi that bears his old number — 6F99 — as a good omen. “My mom saw it when she was about to go on ‘Conan,’ ” she says. “One time I saw it when I was about to go to London, for work. I’m a firm believer [that] it’s not just a coincidence.”
At 5-foot-9 with doe eyes and her mom’s wide smile, Lambert recently signed with One Management, shot a handful of spreads for Numero Tokyo and other high-fashion mags, and is ready to take NYC by storm this Fashion Week. The model and freelance writer will be making an appearance at the Alice + Olivia presentation on Tuesday and supporting her friend Colm Dillane at his KidSuper show on Monday, and also threw a birthday party for herself on Friday night with hundreds of her closest friends.
Although she’d always wanted to model — “I saw Kate Moss in a magazine when I was 12 years old, and I was like, ‘Done,’ ” she says — she wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to do outside of posing for the camera.
She found it in journalism, first covering music at the Village Voice, and then politics and social justice elsewhere. She now writes for Web sites such as Vice.com and TeenVogue.com, for which she covered the Washington, DC, Women’s March.
“It kind of shook me,” she says of the experience. “I was shook for like three months, and it put me in such a state.”
Now, she has grander plans than landing a perfume contract.
“I want to be John Oliver,” she says.
Getting political doesn’t always end well for celebrity offspring. Consider fellow model Kendall Jenner’s cringe-worthy flop of a Pepsi commercial earlier this year, in which she stopped a protest by handing a cop a can of Pepsi: “I can’t even,” says Lambert. “The memes that I saw that came out of that were golden, and I’m a meme queen, so those are all saved in my phone.”
But protesting comes naturally to the earnest activist. Before the Women’s March, she had canvassed for Bernie Sanders, protested with Black Lives Matter and, as a teenager, even headed to Rwanda with mom Diane to support the anti-poverty charity work of Heifer International.
“My mom really just wanted me to be aware of what the world is like outside of LA,” she says. “It’s a crazy bubble. The stuff I’ve seen people get mad about in LA, it’s like — that’s salad dressing. You’ll be fine, you’ll get another salad.”
She says her mom is supportive of her modeling career, too.
“She was like, ‘You do what you want to do, you get it done, but I support you and I’m cheering for you from the sidelines,’ ” she says. “And obviously [she helped] me where she could and [gave] me advice.”
Still, she doesn’t always take the wisdom mom dishes out, particularly when it comes to shaping her own identity.
“My style is very, very laid-back, and my mom is much more of a sophisticated lady type,” says Lambert, who favors crop tops and sneakers over dresses and heels. “Every once in a while she’s like, ‘Eleanor, do you think maybe you should be wearing this or that?’ ”
Take Lambert’s beloved heavy black eyeliner. “[My mom] is like, ‘You should really try brown makeup,’ ” she says. “I don’t, but I’m sure in time, I’ll look back and be like, ‘You were right.’ ”
For now, the Lower East Side resident is enjoying life as a young, single creative in the big city — hobnobbing with pals such as models Paloma Elsesser and Richie Shazam Khan.
Just don’t expect to see her clubbing with them. “I’m like, ‘If I’m going to stand in line, and then inside with the same group of people, why wouldn’t I just hang out in my apartment and have 10 friends over and chill and watch TV and have some rosé?’ ” she says.
She did make an exception for her 24th birthday, however. She rang in her new year on Friday, with a blowout bash at Chelsea spot Kola House with her best friend, Leah Kalmenson, who also turns 24 this month.
“Our friend Eric [Marx co-]owns Kola House,” she says. “He hooked it up.” (Coincidentally, the club is also owned by PepsiCo — Pepsi, if you’re considering another attempt at marketing to activists, Lambert’s your girl.)
And to keep pace with the glamour of Fashion Week, she turned to designers Antonio and Jesus Estrada for a custom minidress to wear on her big night. “I wanted red, I wanted loud, I wanted short, I wanted sparkly,” she says. “They pulled this out and I was like, ‘Ahhh!’ ”
Its name, of course: “The Eleanor.”