Recently, Kim Hastreiter—artist, curator, co-founder of Paper magazine, and legendary downtown bon vivant—was having one of her parties. There were six kinds of soup and at least as many kinds of people: the tennis player John McEnroe; the artists Sarah Sze and Lisa Yuskavage; the musician James Murphy, of LCD Soundsystem, and his wife, the activist and restaurateur Christina Topsøe; the guy who did Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden. An unusual scent wafted from the kitchen, the merging vapors of tom yum and ribollita.
Hastreiter, who was wearing her “uniform” of a custom-made Mao jacket and a pleated skirt, has been called the Gertrude Stein of her era because of her knack for bringing together extraordinary combinations—of flavors, visual elements, and, above all, creative people. Standing in her living room, in front of a painting of a name tag that read “HELLO my name is Satan,” Hastreiter recalled a dinner she once gave for the director Pedro Almodóvar, her longtime friend, to which she’d invited Todd Solondz, who’d just released his indie hit “Happiness.” “It’s, like, my favorite movie—I die for it,” Hastreiter said. “And I knew Pedro would have a heart attack if I got Todd to come. So I’m getting ready, cooking, I hadn’t even taken a shower, it’s five-thirty, and the doorbell rang.” She had invited her guests for seven-thirty, but Solondz was there early. “He sat for two hours in my house, alone, waiting for the party to start!”
Fortunately, there was a lot for him to look at. Hastreiter’s apartment is a kind of aesthetic orgy. (Almodóvar re-created it in his latest film, “The Room Next Door.”) Hastreiter breezed past walls with dozens of pictures by artists she has cultivated over the years: Keith Haring, Malick Sidibé, Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom she used to share a pot dealer. On every shelf in every room: curiosities. Stacks of skateboard decks. A George Rickey kinetic sculpture. Ceramic potatoes.
“What’s this all about?” McEnroe, standing on a rug that resembled a pile of Cheez Doodles, asked, pointing at an albino basketball encased in Lucite.
“That’s from my friend—James Bond is his name, believe it or not. He had a sneaker store called Undefeated,” Hastreiter explained breathlessly. “I used to do these twenty-four-hour ‘cultural department stores’ in L.A. and invite people to set up these little shops, but they had to make something special you couldn’t buy anywhere else.”
Hastreiter’s collections are the ostensible subject of her forthcoming book, “Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos,” a memoir told through the history of her possessions and the friends who concocted them. “When I turned seventy, I realized, like, God, I see the end,” Hastreiter said. “And then you get these young people writing about the eighties who weren’t even born yet . . . and getting everything wrong!” She’d come to New York in 1976 and started working as a shop girl uptown, selling clothes to Barbra Streisand, Nora Ephron, and Jacqueline Kennedy. (“She once asked me if navy blue was ‘in.’ ”) Bill Cunningham, who used to photograph Hastreiter’s outfits on her morning commute to work directly from Studio 54 or the Mudd Club, helped her get a job as a style editor at the SoHo Weekly News. In 1984, Hastreiter and her friend David Hershkovits, along with two designers, started Paper; initially, they’d sneak into the Times offices to use various analog appliances. “I know how to develop film in a can,” Hastreiter bragged. “I know how to do cut and paste with a wax machine.”
A few weeks before her soup party, Hastreiter had learned that she’d be receiving the Cooper Hewitt’s Design Visionary award. “I couldn’t believe I won. It’s, like, crazy—I never win anything!” she said. “And I’m not even in the design world.” She described her job as “helping make great ideas happen.” She recalled the time she paired the French designer and photographer Jean-Paul Goude with Kim Kardashian, a decade ago, for a Paper cover featuring champagne, Kardashian’s tuchus, and, for a refreshing change of pace, her grin. “When they came back with the pictures, I was, like, My God, call the tech people,” Hastreiter recalled. “We have to make it not crash! We released the photos at midnight. It was like a NASA space launch.” Thirteen million people had clicked by first light. “I remember Jeffrey Deitch called me that morning. He’s, like, ‘Kim, this is art.’ ”
In February, Deitch will celebrate the launch of Hastreiter’s book with a show, at his Grand Street gallery, of works by sixty-five of the artists and designers featured in it, called “My Amazing Friends.” “My friends are old and they’re young,” Hastreiter said, gesturing around her bustling, soupy apartment. “I love mixing high and low, funny and serious. It’s too boring if you’re only one thing.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of Paper founders.
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