Best of Design Matters: Kim Hastreiter

Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Kim Hastreiter reflects on her journey from a suburban upbringing to becoming a central figure in New York City's cultural explosion. She de

Key takeaways

• Kim Hastreiter co-founded Paper magazine as a low-cost, high-impact weekly publication using newsprint.
• The early issues of Paper were produced using guerrilla methods, including sneaking into the New York Times to use their typesetting equipment.

Main topics

• Founding of Paper Magazine
• New York City cultural history

Notable quotes

Artists have to, like, put the best art, the best inspiration out in the universe right now.

Conclusion

A profound meditation on the responsibility of creators to act as cult

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This episode of Design Matters originally appeared in March of 2026. Speaker 4 (0:05) To me, right now, what we're going through, that I feel like I have to put art out in the universe. Artists have to, like, put the best art, the best inspiration out in the universe right now. Speaker 3 (0:21) From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. Speaker 3 (0:28) On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with Kim Hastreiter about New York City, art, magazines, and about breaking the internet. Speaker 4 (0:45) No one ever heard of paper, and in 24 hours, everyone knew paper in the whole world. Speaker 2 (0:56) Money ultimately decides what gets built, what survives. Money decides what future becomes possible. So change where money goes and who controls it, then you change what becomes possible. Speaker 5 (1:08) That's Trinity Tran, TED fellow and co-founder of the California Public Banking Alliance and Public Bank LA. A public bank is owned by the people through their local government. And Trinity's spent nearly a decade pushing to make that a reality, from getting L.A. to pull its money out of a large-scale private bank to helping pass the first-in-the-nation law letting California cities and counties start their own public banks. Speaker 2 (1:32) The reason? Los Angeles just dealt with a devastating wildfire. So if we had a public bank, it would have been able to step in to offer immediate low-cost loans without having to wait for federal aid. Hear more from Trinity Tran on the case Speaker 5 (1:47) for public banking only on TED Talks Daily. Speaker 6 (1:58) Kim Hastrider is a creator and a connector of worlds, as well as an editor, curator, collector, and catalyst who has spent more than four decades at the center of cultural emergence. As the co-founder and longtime editor of Paper Magazine, she built one of the most influential platforms documenting the intersection of art, fashion, music, and nightlife in downtown New York and beyond. She's also worked with everyone from Keith Haring to President Barack Obama, and her new book, Stuff, A New York Life of Cultural Chaos, tells the story of her life through the objects and people she has encountered and gathered along the way. Kim Hastreiter, welcome to Design Matters. Speaker 4 (2:46) Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Speaker 6 (2:48) Kim, I understand that you identify as both a loudmouth and a snob. Why is that? Why those two particular things? I think it has Speaker 4 (2:59) a little to do with DNA, I hate to tell you, but it's not a learned thing. But I am kind of stubborn, like my father was, and super opinionated. And also, the older I get, the more I get that way, because the time is running out. I mean, now I'm kind of like... in fast motion because I turned 70. When I turned 70, you know, you kind of see the end and then I become like completely a maniac about like not wasting time. There's no transactional stuff. It's all has to be like high bar. I have a high bar. Speaker 6 (3:35) Yeah. As I'm getting older and older and just right behind you, a couple of years behind you, everything becomes more urgent. Yeah. You grew up. in West Orange, New Jersey, and by your own mother's account, she described you as a square suburban girl. How is that possible? Speaker 4 (3:55) I was just young, you know. I was, I don't Speaker 6 (3:58) know Speaker 4 (3:58) if you remember villager outfits, but, you know, I wore, like, villager outfits with high socks and, like, A-line skirts and, like, little circle pins. I went to high school, junior high school. I walked. It was in the suburbs. And so I... I had a lot of friends, but I wasn't, no one was kooky or like outrageous. And then, you know, it all happened when I went to when I left. Speaker 6 (4:19) Your mother was curious, political, intellectually hungry, and an avid reader of The New Yorker and The New York Times. What did you learn from watching her move through the world? Speaker 4 (4:32) Crossword puzzles. I mean, we did the crossword puzzle maniacally. And so my grandmother, I had a great grandmother too, my nana, her mother. And so, you know, when you're 17 and 16, you don't register any of this stuff. So you register it later on and you look back and you're like, oh my God, she would read about stuff. She'd read about an artist. George Rickey, for example, and she became obsessed. She read about him in The New Yorker. And then we had a schlep up to Connecticut, made my father drive us all to Connecticut to buy a sculpture. You know, it was like $1,000 in those days. But George Rickey did these beautiful, I don't know if you know his work, but he did these beautiful sculptures that were kinetic. Speaker 4 (5:15) I grew up with the George Rickey. And she always went to the restaurants. She always knew everything. We always went to the city. We were a half hour outside of the city in New Jersey. So we were very close to New York. And she always wanted to live in New York. And she always wanted to live in the Butterfield House, which was on 12th Street. And she took classes at the New School. She was always in the city. So it was just kind of like part of the deal. My father was completely eccentric. He had a jewelry store in Newark, New Jersey, that my grandfather started. And my mother started, she really was like, she wanted to be a psychologist or psychiatrist, but it was in those days. You know, you raised your kids, you were in the suburbs. But the second she could leave, they did. Speaker 6 (5:56) I read two different descriptions that you spoke about your father, and both of them were really wonderful. You stated that he was utterly unembarrassed by himself and that he also would have driven you to the moon if you asked. Speaker 4 (6:14) How Speaker 6 (6:15) did that kind of unconditional support, both internally and externally, shape your sense of possibility? Speaker 4 (6:22) I mean, he was just... Both of them. Anything I did, it could be like completely crazy. They were like, how can we help? Like, what can we do? And my father would like, one time when I started paper in my house the first year, he calls me up urgently. Like before cell phones, we had like dial phones. And he's like, Kim, I was just on 12th Street and Women's Wear Daily used to be on 12th Street, Fairchild it was called. He said, they're moving and they have all these desks on the street. There's those huge. gray steel desk. He said, there's like 20 of them. You want them? I was like, yes. So he went and like basically stood there for the whole day guarding them because he wanted them. And then we got like a mover and we moved them all into Lisbon Art Street, into my loft. And I couldn't even walk. It was so many desks. And then he used to go to, when I started paper, he would go to all the newsstands and torture them, like completely, because he could be torture. And he'd make them, he's like, what do you think of this newspaper? And it was a poster. It was like a zine, you know? Yeah, it was a broadsheet, right? Yeah, and the news dealers would look at him like, who is this? And he'd say, well, I think it should be here. And he would hang it like in front. So he was my like man on the streets. He would go to every news. They used to have magazine stores. And every newsstand, there used to be newsstands, and make it and put it in the front. Like all throughout the village and the East Village and the West Village and Soho. He was like a maniac. Well, he did a really good job Speaker 6 (7:52) because that's where I lived and hung out. And I always saw it front and center in the newsstands because I'd always be looking at what was happening in Speaker 4 (8:00) the little newsstands. But he was very eccentric. I had a very eccentric father. When you're young, you're completely embarrassed. He was embarrassed. Oh, my God, I was embarrassed by him, so embarrassed, because he would do these crazy things, especially with food. If you were in a restaurant, like, he would, like, I can't even tell you what he would do in a restaurant. Like, we used to go to this restaurant every Sunday. It was called Don's. It was, like, a hamburger restaurant. He would take the pickles, and then he would dip them in ice water. Then he would dry them all off. We would have finished already. And he would take the coleslaw, and then he would drain the coleslaw. He'd ask for an extra dish, and then he'd have a big dish of coleslaw juice, and then he'd make the waiter take it away. All before, I mean, he was like crazy. And then he would take the hamburger, put napkins on top. He would take the bun off, and then he'd squeeze the juice out of it. Like, he was crazy, my father. And so I was, like, embarrassed completely. Speaker 4 (8:53) once a plate Speaker 6 (8:54) of salad across the room in a restaurant just for the fun of it. Not because he was angry. He could do things like that when he was, oh, it was really, well, he was very complicated. He was both eccentric and also very stern. And so that combination always kept me sort of on my toes. But I do think that it inspired me to. be much more aware of my surroundings than I might have ordinarily have been, and that's a good thing. Speaker 4 (9:23) The weirdest thing about my father, the best thing that I always loved, was that he lived in his own universe, and people were all the same. I would catch him sometimes talking to a drag queen for like a half hour. He had no idea it was a drag queen, nor did he care, but it was a drag queen in full drag, and he would just... talk to them the same way he would talk to the guy in the farmer's market that sold the tomatoes. And he would, he talked to everyone equally. He never had thought there was a difference between people. So Speaker 6 (9:53) he didn't have any judgment of Speaker 4 (9:55) himself Speaker 6 (9:55) or others. Speaker 4 (9:56) And Speaker 6 (9:57) that's, that's incredible. Speaker 4 (9:58) That Speaker 6 (9:59) kind of unconditional support never goes away. I think once that is instilled in you at a young age, good job, Mr. Housewriter. Good job. Your childhood home was filled with carefully curated design, Dansk flatware, Nakashima furniture, Jack Lenore Larson textiles. Did you understand at that time how taste was a bit of a language? Speaker 4 (10:27) Well, from my mother. My mother had really good taste. And so she had this friend named Milton Klein, who was a really great architect from South Orange, New Jersey. And so she loved him and she loved his taste. She thought he had the best taste. And my grandmother also had really good taste. So she was brought up with good stuff. And my mother loved clothes. She loved fashion. She always was like kind of chic. And my grandmother had a clothing store. She sold Glamour Cardinal. That was her. friend. I mean, you know, so we always ate off of Dansk silverware. It's called Variation V, and it's designed, I forget who it's designed by. It's like my favorite knives, forks, and spoons. You still have them, right? Oh, yeah. I eat off them. I have them. I bought more of them. I have like service for like 30. of those. And then all the dance enamel stuff. And then Nakashima, she fell in love with Nakashima because she like read about him in The New Yorker. And then she made my father schlep to like Pennsylvania to meet him. And then they, she was, and I didn't know what she was talking about, but she would come back and she had bought like the table, the chairs, the shell, you know, all this Nakashima stuff. And my father, because he was so open, you know, he, she was definitely bossy, my mother. And so she would bought, he would just do whatever she wanted, you know. So, okay, we'll go. And he didn't have any clue, but he would drive her and he would go with her. And what else did she collect? She got the George Rickey sculpture, which is like in the Museum of Modern Art garden now, his sculpture. It's in like, he's a famous sculptor. I still have it in my house, the sculpture, this little sculpture. And my dog used to knock it over all the time and all the little like things would come out because it was all about balance. The sculpture was all about balance. So we'd have to schlep up to Connecticut to get him to redo everything like a hundred times. Speaker 6 (12:10) Now, you said that you collected crocheted clown dolls instead of Barbies as you were growing up. Speaker 4 (12:16) Well, no, not when I was growing up. That was after I grew up and I was in school. But when I was growing up, I had this thing called a Jenny doll. And I had a monkey. But not a real monkey. No, a stuffed monkey named Floppiers. I didn't really have a lot of dolls. And then I always liked art classes in school. I played tennis. I liked sports. I mean, I was just like, you know, I used to like gab on the phone with my friends, like as a teenager, we would, my princess phone and my bedroom, you know. But I wasn't like a crazy teenager. Speaker 6 (12:52) You chose to go to Washington University in St. Louis in 1969 and arrived at Washington University dressed in Peter Pan collars and penny loafers. Why that school and what did you think you wanted to do professionally at that point? Speaker 4 (13:07) It was really pretty. That's why you chose it? Yeah, it had this beautiful quadrangle. I was like, oh, I loved how it looked. I only went there because of how it looked. I had no idea. I applied to all these different schools. That was the one I went to. You know, I didn't know I was doing, what's it called, like just general arts and sciences. And I took all these classes and I was like, I was kind of like bored. But then I met art students and I started becoming more like there was this art school down the hall, down the hill. There was a hill. And I decided I wanted to go to art school. So I went to Europe, traveled around Europe, and then went to art school there for just like. one semester, and then I was like sick of it already. And then I went to Nova Scotia. You Speaker 6 (13:52) protested the Vietnam War. Speaker 4 (13:54) Yeah. So when I arrived at, you know, 1969, when you went to college, that's when Kent State happened. And it was like a really wild year. So my first year of college was half shut down. The college shut down. I mean, Washington University was like a huge youth quake of revolution. And we took over the ROTC building, like climbing through windows. I mean, it was wild. I think you just narrowly avoided going to jail. Yes, I did. And I had friends that went to jail and we were all like smoking pot and taking acid. And then I remember my friends all went to jail because they got pot sent to them in a package and it got, I had friends that like went to federal prison also for like. doing this radical revolutionary stuff. And the girl got killed in Kent State, and that was like a big deal. So really, like, it was a crazy year. What made you decide to apply to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design? Because I was at art school. I went to art school at Washington University, you know, but it was more like painting and drawing, and I wasn't into that, but I was really getting into, like, I lived, my family lived in New York, so I would come back. My friends were in New York, and I would just always come back to New York and go to the galleries. And I just started reading avidly, like, Art Forum. Like, Art Forum was kind of like my Bible. And they kept talking about this school called Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which most people haven't heard of. If you are in the art world. It was a really major, special place. It was this crazy art school that existed. And it was in Canada. It was in Nova Scotia. And it was completely no classes. It was like the most avant-garde conceptual art. Like amazing people taught there. Like Joseph Beuys taught there. Art Tank taught there. I mean, amazing. It was international. They had tons of money. Speaker 4 (15:47) I applied and I got in because I was doing this body of work. My work was like already like I had a thing that I was doing. You're doing these really large metal paintings. Yeah, with metal dust. Yeah. And it was inspired by tantric art. And then I started kind of like the same essence. I started doing these performances and these like kind of installations. And my work was like very specific. And I got in and I. It was like $100 a semester. It was really cheap. And my parents were like, okay, go there. You know, that's fine. And I got a pickup truck and I drove to Nova Scotia by myself. And, like, I remember Danielle Buren was one of my teachers. I mean, it was like— Wasn't Vito Acconci one? Vito was there. I was his intern. Because a lot of those people also worked at CalArts. They were connected. CalArts was connected to Nova Scotia in those days. How did that environment shape your understanding of what art and artists could be? Huge. Because there were no classes. So all they would do, they had so much money, they would bring artists in and they would do these like kind of seminars. And I met like, I don't know if you know who Art Penk was from East Germany. I mean, this is before the wall came down. It was like we had Envito and then all of the Art of Povera people. Like, I don't know if you know that group of artists. Speaker 4 (17:07) They were from Italy, and they were doing, like, conceptual art. And, like, Richard Serra was there, and Robert Smithson was there. And, like, Eva Hess had already died, but she was one of my favorite artists. She was a really great sculptor who died very young. And then Jonas Mikus taught me there. I met him there. I mean, so it was, like, every single—and then they would all come in because Nova Scotia had a— Tamarin Press. So they had so much money. They would print books for artists and they would do series of lithographs for artists. And if you came and all you had to do was teach and you could get a free book published or like a series of lithographs printed, you know. So all these great artists from all over the world, Klaus Oldenburg even came, I think. And the great artists from Europe, everywhere. came there. And a lot of them were more conceptual artists from that moment. Art Povera was like this movement in Italy that was like a certain movement. If you look it up, there's all these artists that are attached to it. Yanis Kounalis and, you know, there was amazing art. So I really like, my mind was completely blown. And from there you went to CalArts. Yeah, because that was kind of the logical thing. So like Laurie Anderson and all those people, all the CalArts people would come to Nova Scotia and then Nova Scotia people would go there. And you studied with John Speaker 6 (18:34) Baldessari, who I know is also your neighbor. You came deeply immersed in fine art, but you said you longed for more fun than the art world was offering. What fun did you feel was missing? I just felt Speaker 4 (18:47) like, oh my, I mean, you know, I loved art and I love making art, but I mean, I just kept thinking like, there is more than just this. So I met this guy, Joey Arias, who's like a performer who I'm actually trying right this minute, I'm going to produce this amazing extravaganza musical show that's going to come out next year of his work. We're best friends. And I met him, and he was so amazing. And then I met this whole group of people that went clubbing, and they just were outrageous. And then they just kind of took me under the wing. And I would be going to CalArts every day, which was like an hour drive on the freeway. But I would start to spend time with them. And then they would show me. We started going to thrift stores. I mean, I just... fell in love with these people. So I had a dual life. And then I would bring Joey up to CalArts and they all looked at me like, what? Like they didn't get it. But then some of them did get it. There were some really great artists and all the women at CalArts, just so you know, when we graduated, not one woman got into a gallery. It was like this whole, I have that, that's what really set me off. And we thought everything was about the work. And if you did great work, you would get in a gallery. And John was really a great teacher. He really loved my work. And he was a great teacher. And he was very generous. He never competed with his