Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

Kim Hastreiter

March 2, 2026·1 hr 18 min·5 clips

Paper's 'Break the Internet' cover with Kim Kardashian naked, shot by Jean-Paul Gaultier, generated 13 million hits in an hour.

Kim Hastreiter begins with urgency. Artists, she says, have to put their best art and inspiration into the world right now, and that pressure gives the episode its pulse. The story soon heads downtown. The host sets up a life built around New York City, art, magazines, and the strange speed with which Paper became known almost overnight. Soho News comes through as the messy classroom. Hastreiter remembers eccentric, self-directed people packed into an office where babies hung near typesetting desks, smoke sat in the air, and everyone seemed to arrive late after being out too long. She makes the place sound ridiculous, but not cute. The Sex Pistols might pass through. An angry artist might stage a shocking protest over a review. The walls seemed to know too much. Debbie keeps steering past the spectacle toward the origin story. Her follow-up brings Hastreiter back to the moment after Soho News folded, when she and David Hershkowitz decided to make something of their own. The mood shifts there. The office stories stop being just downtown chaos and start sounding like training: how to watch, how to gather people, how to trust a half-formed idea. Hastreiter remembers Soho before it became a fixed scene. Restaurants were appearing, attention was arriving, and the neighborhood's rough creative energy was starting to get named by outsiders. The episode lets memory stay uneven, which helps. Its strongest moments are not neat magazine legend. They are crowded rooms, strange encounters, work done side by side, and people carrying a world forward because nobody had formalized it yet. Even the dangling baby gets a return. Years later, a waitress at Odeon tells Hastreiter she had been one of those office children, and suddenly a throwaway detail lands with feeling. Under the jokes is a plain, serious case for art and magazines when the world feels unstable. Hastreiter likes making things and gathering people. Debbie gives her room to show how a publication can start as friendship, timing, defiance, and city noise before anyone knows what to call it.

As heard by us

A vivid, detail-rich look at New York magazine life and the improvised culture around Soho News and Paper.

Kim Hastreiter and Debbie Millman talk through New York City, art, magazines, Soho News, and Paper with the kind of rough-edged detail that makes a scene feel lived in.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want New York publishing lore with actual grit.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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