Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Kim Hastreiter is a cultural anthropologist and the original multi-hyphenate. An editor, publisher, writer, artist, creative director, curator, connector, and big idea person, she is most known for co-founding Paper magazine in 1984. Her career of identifying cultural movements and connecting the dots between style, design, art and culture is legendary. Hastreiter has been profiled in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune and was awarded the Eugenia Sheppard Award for journalism by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2010 and Pratt Institute’s Legends Award in 2014. In April 2024, Hastreiter was awarded the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Visionary Award for her life’s work. Hastreiter has published several books including Geoffrey Beene: An American Fashion Rebel, 20 Years of Style, and a four-volume collection from photographer Paige Powell. During the pandemic, Hastreiter created a newspaper called The New Now, a public art project that now serves as a historical document of the time. She is also an editor for the international design magazine, Apartamento. Hastreiter, a New Jersey native and consummate New Yorker, lives with her beloved dog Hoda in Greenwich Village perched atop Washington Square Park.
Hastreiter has spent the last 50 years amassing a deep and iconoclastic collection of stuff. Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos is more than a memoir; it’s a loopy, joyous, chaotic ride through the last half century of cultural chaos in the greatest city on earth. Stuff is a storytelling project about an extraordinary slice of history and the people who defined it, using Hastreiter’s singular edit of art, fashion, design, photography, books, and ephemera as a lens. In these pages, you’ll meet Hastreiter’s amazing friends: at an all-night party in the basement of an East Village church with Keith Haring, a private art sale with Jeffrey Deitch in Phyllis Diller’s kitchen, or impromptu cocktails at Trader Vic’s with Salvador Dalí and Joey Arias. In Hastreiter’s New York, a leopard print Fiorucci look catches the attention of legendary photographer Bill Cunningham and sparks a lifelong friendship. A chance run-in with Hastreiter’s neighbor Steve McCurry has her witness the creation of the defining image of 9/11. And a trip with her mother to buy a dining table from Nakashima sets off a devotion to patina as a form of personal history. Whether you are an OG or a kid, a culture vulture, artist, design buff, fashion nerd, skater, collector, chef, cinephile, New Yorker, uptowner, downtowner, out-of-towner or something else entirely, Stuff will make you feel like you’re sitting with Hastreiter in her garden high above Washington Square Park, her booming voice imploring you to follow your heart and listen when the voice inside your head screams YES. Hastreiter is begging us to pursue our lives with compulsive enthusiasm, by generously walking us through her own. Stuff is more than the sum of its parts: It is a provocation and a road map for building a creative life.
Kim Hastreiter is a cultural anthropologist and the original multi-hyphenate. An editor, publisher, writer, artist, creative director, curator, connector, and big idea person, she is most known for co-founding Paper magazine in 1984. Her career of identifying cultural movements and connecting the dots between style, design, art and culture is legendary. Hastreiter has been profiled in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune and was awarded the Eugenia Sheppard Award for journalism by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2010 and Pratt Institute’s Legends Award in 2014. In April 2024, Hastreiter was awarded the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Visionary Award for her life’s work. Hastreiter has published several books including Geoffrey Beene: An American Fashion Rebel, 20 Years of Style, and a four-volume collection from photographer Paige Powell. During the pandemic, Hastreiter created a newspaper called The New Now, a public art project that now serves as a historical document of the time. She is also an editor for the international design magazine, Apartamento. Hastreiter, a New Jersey native and consummate New Yorker, lives with her beloved dog Hoda in Greenwich Village perched atop Washington Square Park.
Hastreiter has spent the last 50 years amassing a deep and iconoclastic collection of stuff. Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos is more than a memoir; it’s a loopy, joyous, chaotic ride through the last half century of cultural chaos in the greatest city on earth. Stuff is a storytelling project about an extraordinary slice of history and the people who defined it, using Hastreiter’s singular edit of art, fashion, design, photography, books, and ephemera as a lens. In these pages, you’ll meet Hastreiter’s amazing friends: at an all-night party in the basement of an East Village church with Keith Haring, a private art sale with Jeffrey Deitch in Phyllis Diller’s kitchen, or impromptu cocktails at Trader Vic’s with Salvador Dalí and Joey Arias. In Hastreiter’s New York, a leopard print Fiorucci look catches the attention of legendary photographer Bill Cunningham and sparks a lifelong friendship. A chance run-in with Hastreiter’s neighbor Steve McCurry has her witness the creation of the defining image of 9/11. And a trip with her mother to buy a dining table from Nakashima sets off a devotion to patina as a form of personal history. Whether you are an OG or a kid, a culture vulture, artist, design buff, fashion nerd, skater, collector, chef, cinephile, New Yorker, uptowner, downtowner, out-of-towner or something else entirely, Stuff will make you feel like you’re sitting with Hastreiter in her garden high above Washington Square Park, her booming voice imploring you to follow your heart and listen when the voice inside your head screams YES. Hastreiter is begging us to pursue our lives with compulsive enthusiasm, by generously walking us through her own. Stuff is more than the sum of its parts: It is a provocation and a road map for building a creative life.
