NEW YORK - The coolest person in New York may well be a large 58-yearold woman who wears cherry-colored glasses and a linen smock, and is planning a hip replacement.

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.

What separates Kim Hastreiter from ordinary power people is that no imaginary velvet rope cordons off her cohort of acquaintances and friends.

“Kim isn’t just about big guys or big guys versus little guys,” Sally Singer, the fashion features director of Vogue, said . “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 but a San Francisco unknown when Ms. Hastreiter first was drawn 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!’ ”

In Ms. Hastreiter’s vocabulary, “sick” 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 Almodovar, a friend of many years and, oh, by the way, Penelope Cruz.

Even better than sick, linguistically, is death. It practically killed Ms. Hastreiter when she learned of her selection in May 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.

“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 heatseeking missile” for talent.

It is true that at Ms. Hastreiter’s table at trendy restaurant Indochine one may bump into the occasional It girl. But it is far more likely that one will encounter her latest intern or artistic discovery, or Shaun White, the snowboard god or the artist Ruben Toledo attempting to chat with John Waters across the platinum-blond palisade of Lady Bunny’s wig.

Ms. Hastreiter draws few lines between cultural disciplines. Art and design and fashion occur everywhere, in her view, not just in academia and fashion show 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.

But hold on. A 2007 profile of Ms. Hastreiter in The New Yorker magazine 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.

Yet if you ask Ms. Hastreiter 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.”


By GUY TREBAY


CASEY KELBAUGH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Kim Hastreitner, coeditor of Paper magazine, mixes and mingles at a New York party.