Paper Magazine Editor Is Powerful, but No Power Snob

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.