The Enthusiast.(Kim Hastreiter)

Kim Hastreiter has never been married or had children of her own (she has a terrier, Romeo), but everyone who knows her agrees that Paper, the downtown-life-style magazine she founded with David Hershkovits, in 1984, is a family--a freewheeling, kitschy, Munsters-like family, but a happy and highly functional one. The members of ThreeAsFour, a Chinatown fashion collective, call Hastreiter Mama Kim. The experimental designer Andre Walker used to call her Aunty. Sarah Sophie Flicker, a performance artist and one of the founders of a musical group called the Citizen's Band, who grew up in San Francisco, thinks of her as "my New York mom." The magazine, since its inception, has served as a pop-culture incubator, documenting the fashion, music, and art born from surfing, skateboarding, hip-hop, and gay life. In a recent issue, a gritty fashion spread photographed at several Los Angeles drive-throughs featured the model Jenny Shimizu on a Ducati, and the wife of Erik Brunetti, who designs FUCT T-shirts, with a lapful of fast food. The artist Ruben Toledo, who is married to the fashion designer Isabel Toledo, says that Paper is "the Wayward School of Creative Gypsies, and everyone in the creative world sets up camp there at one time or another."

Hastreiter is fifty-five, and looks more like the artsy woman who taught me pottery in junior high than like a typical fashion editor--not that she considers herself a fashion person. "I think the fashion world is so twisted, and that's why I'm not in that world," she says. "They're so concerned with what's trendy that they don't care if it's great." Her speech is as excited and unvarnished as a teen-ager's emoting over a favorite video game: what she likes is sick or beautiful; it gives her a heart attack; it kills her. She is large, and dresses in a uniform of loose, monochromatic linen--grainy-mustard yellow, indigo, green, or tomato red--Ted Muehling drop earrings, and a pair of cherry-Jolly-Rancher-red glasses that draw attention to the faculties for which she is known: visual acuity and an ability to spot undiscovered talent. "The glasses are a genuine metaphor for who she is--a person who sees things differently," Murray Moss, the co-owner of the design store Moss, said. "The first thing you see with those glasses is that she's looking at you. It's not that you discovered Kim. Kim discovered you--that's clear."

"I look at fashion from this other eyeball," Hastreiter says. "I smell cultural movements, and I try to articulate what I'm smelling." She is usually months, if not years, ahead of the mainstream. "Pre-Vogue" is how Isaac Mizrahi defines her timetable. "She's always got some crazy person she's hawking, someone you have to meet and no one's ever heard of. Then, two years later, everyone knows who they are, and you can't get an appointment for love or money."

Hastreiter's parties are famous for their unlikely mix of people--she likes to invite a wild card, such as Iris Apfel--and for the food, which Hastreiter, an accomplished cook, prepares from scratch. "You leave feeling giddy and inspired," Karen Kimmel, an artist who lives in Los Angeles, says. "You've made a new friendship, or found a potential collaborator, or heard of a store to go see, or made a connection over something visual with someone." George Lois, the pioneering magazine and ad designer, and his wife, Rosemary, say that, as a hostess and a matchmaker, Hastreiter is a present-day Gertrude Stein. "Kim finds these people, and she collects them like butterflies," George said. "I'm sure she could pull out a giant drawer and we're all there." The director Pedro Almodovar wrote in an e-mail that, over the course of a twenty-year friendship with Hastreiter, she has introduced him to "underground artists, future legends, local icons, or simply deliciously extravagant and inspiring people." These people, he went on, "turn Downtown NY into a wild, welcoming, bright, dissolute, funny, unique and inspiring place. The sort of place you have to travel to at least twice a year unless you really want to fall into despair and boredom."

Paper, which has a circulation of about a hundred thousand, projects to its readers a fantasy of scrappy New York bohemia and an idea of downtown that gentrification has all but routed. The August issue had a story on the twenty-five-year-old designer behind the street-wear brand Married to the MOB (Most Official Bitches), and another on the Chinatown Soccer Club, a squad that sometimes includes the artist Ryan McGinness. But the changes in the city have hit the magazine where it ...