Paper Magazine Editor is Powerful, but no Power Snob
Does anyone remember that, long before Madonna was a zillionairess with a fake British accent, she used to dance at the Roxy with a posse of Latino b-boys? Kim Hastreiter does. Are there many who recall when Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings, created in a basement on manic cocaine binges, were being sold for $200 on the street at what his dealer termed a fire sale? Well, there is Ms. Hastreiter. Are there two people alive who celebrated the bicentennial by driving cross-country from California in a Dodge truck called the Dragon Wagon to storm New York City with Joey Arias riding shotgun? There is just one.
The coolest person in New York may well be a large 58-year-old woman who wears cherry-colored glasses and a linen smock, and is planning a hip replacement. That is hip, as in orthopedics, not as in “tragically.”
If Kim Hastreiter is most familiar as one of the two editors of Paper (the other is David Hershkovitz), the downtown magazine in its 26th year, she is less publicly visible as one of the genuine connectors in a city where power is often measured in terms of social circuitry.
To say that Kim Hastreiter knows practically everyone who matters in the cultural life of this city is an understatement and, anyway, does her no favors. A lot of people here know practically everyone, or anyway claim they do. What separates Kim Hastreiter from the run of ordinary power people is that no imaginary velvet rope cordons off her cohort of acquaintances and friends. Like a lot of this town’s celebrity brokers and society hostesses and fame wranglers, she keeps a mental list of interesting types. Unlike the average power snob, though, she shares her list freely and it is never closed.
“Kim isn’t just about big guys or big guys versus little guys,” Sally Singer, the fashion features director of Vogue, said of Ms. Hastreiter. “You could be Madonna or Beth Ditto or the next big thing in art or design,” Ms. Singer said. “But you could just as easily be some adorable, highly androgynous club creature that’s going to be a fun person to have at a party for a year before you go home to Duluth.”
Ms. Hastreiter is excited by any of the above. She is excited, period. “She’ll call and say, ‘I found this thing, this person, this girl who does letters,’ ” Ms. Singer said, specifically referring to the artist Tauba Auerbach, now an art world fixture (she is featured in the current
Whitney Biennial) but a San Francisco unknown when Ms. Hastreiter first cottoned to her stylized experiments in typography.
“She’ll call you,” Ms. Singer said, “and say, “You have to see this artist, her work is sick!’ ”
Sick is a carryall word in Ms. Hastreiter’s vocabulary; it packs in everything good. It is “sick” when she spots an artist whose work excites her, and “sick” when the cabaret wonder Joey Arias shows up in a slick pompadour and “sick” when Madonna descends on a dinner party Ms. Hastreiter is holding at Casa Lever for
Pedro Almodóvar, a friend of many years and, oh, by the way,
Penélope Cruz.
Sick becomes an outright heart attack when something truly thrills Ms. Hastreiter. Even better than cardiac arrest, linguistically, is death. It practically killed Ms. Hastreiter last month when she learned of her selection by the
Council of Fashion Designers of America as the recipient of its prestigious Eugenia Sheppard Award.
“I died,” she said. “I’m like an artist, like an outsider person,” and not one of the fashion cognoscenti, she explained recently, sitting in her modest office at Paper, anomalously located in a section of Midtown that could be called Garment District Adjacent.
“Put me in a room with 30 billionaires and one artist and I’ll find the artist,” Ms. Hastreiter explained. “I have zero ability to smell money. But I’m a heat-seeking missile,” for talent. And the talents that kill her are so wildly assorted that a Paper party can sometimes seem like a social mix-tape run amok.
Doubtless she would protest the comparison, but in a sense Ms. Hastreiter is the successor, however unlikely, to society hostesses like Pat Buckley who once gathered at their tables a regular segment of the city’ s social gratin. Elites take on different contours in Ms. Hastreiter’s hands, though, and rather than
Henry Kissinger at her dinner table you are more likely to find the apparition called Ladyfag, a woman who dresses like a man dressed in drag.
It is true that at Ms. Hastreiter’s table at Indochine one may bump into the occasional It girl or social X-ray. But it is far more likely that one will encounter her latest intern or artistic discovery, or Shaun White, the snowboard god (who just turned up at the Paper offices in late February, fresh from his gold-medal-winning performance at the winter Olympics) or the artist Ruben Toledo attempting to chat with
John Waters across the platinum-blonde palisade of Lady Bunny’s wig.
There are so many parties and so many stories. Thelma Golden, the director of the
Studio Museum in Harlem, was introduced to her future husband, the Nigerian designer Duro Olowu, at one of Ms. Hastreiter’s wingdings.
Liza Minnelli appeared as the surprise guest performer at another Paper party, on an anything-goes bill that also included the Virgins. Ms. Hastreiter once took over the Ukrainian Embassy and invited uptown socialites like Ann Slater to meet the social arbiters of life below 14th Street, who happen, in most cases, to be men whose preferred undergarments are corsets or Spanx. “She’s got this gift for making that which is indie seem commercial and that which is commercial seem indie,” Ms. Singer said.
Kim Hastreiter, said Steven Kolb, the executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers, is one of “these unsung personalities in our industry who isn’t often associated with accolades. She just trudges through it all and has done amazing things for the industry and for young designers and not in a public way.” Among the designers whose cause she has championed over the past several decades are Isabel Toledo, Heatherette, the collective AsFour (now known as threeASFOUR), Mr. Olowu and also
Geoffrey Beene, the legendary and legendarily prickly designer whose one-time fan letter to Ms. Hastreiter resulted in a friendship that went on to span decades.
Ms. Hastreiter draws few lines between cultural disciplines, perhaps because she began her career as a painter and only accidentally strayed into fashion and then publishing. Art and design and fashion occur everywhere, in her view, not just in academia and the Bryant Park tents. It was, after all, at places like Club 57, the Pyramid and the Mudd Club that an entire generation of Ms. Hastreiter’s contemporaries — artists, designers and performers — came into its own.
“Kim comes from the counterculture, and the counterculture is an important part of the fashion culture, a fact we don’t recognize enough,” said Stan Herman, the designer and former president of the Council of Fashion Designers. Mr. Herman added that, “unfortunately, this is not the countercultural time.”
But hold on. A 2007 profile of Ms. Hastreiter in
The New Yorker asserted that the continued success of Paper, which has a circulation of about 100,000, is built on a fantasy it projects of a scrappy New York bohemia and an idea of downtown that gentrification has all but routed.
Is downtown really dead? Sure, the Mudd Club is long gone and many of the brilliant names of the era died untimely deaths or went on to become names in the high school art curriculum. Yet if you ask Ms. Hastreiter — a woman so unconcerned with seeming cool or ironic that she actually talks about taking life’s lemons and making lemonade — whether all that is great and thrilling about New York City actually came to an end, as some fogies insist, around 1985, she snorts. “I hate when people say everything was so much better back then,” she said. “I live for the combustion that occurs when you bring together unlikely combinations of people and that’s the same as it ever was.”
She cites the example of a recent Los Angeles pop-up gallery sponsored by Paper where the “Rodarte girls were next to the people from the Mollusk Surf Shop in Venice; who were next to Mr. Cartoon, this genius Mexican tattoo artist; who was next to a drag queen; and, God help me, everybody was excited to work with people that, in a ghettoized place like Los Angeles, they would never meet in a million years.”
This very week, Ms. Hastreiter noted, “this genius art collective called the
Family “is opening a monthlong pop-up gallery at 70 Franklin Street in TriBeCa, where they plan to do something pretty close to what Ms. Hastreiter does in Los Angeles. “They’re going to curate everything from readings to music to art to live stuff,” Ms. Hastreiter said. “What I love most about it is that it’s not just 20-year-olds, it’s not about age, it’s not about limitations, it’s about community.” Community and creativity, “always trump shallowness and hype in the end,” Ms. Hastreiter added. “I die for that.”
