Shot From the Hip

What do surfwear maker Quiksilver, AIDS, laptops and hip-hop have in common?

All have had an enormous impact on the way we live today, say Paper magazine founders Kim Hastreiter and David Hershkovits. A New York-based glossy magazine that began life as a black-and-white fold-out poster, Paper has defined what is hip before it gets trendy.

Aimed at what its editors call “the hipoisie,” Paper covers an eclectic mix of art, music, night life and social issues, from those forever on the fringe to those on the verge of becoming household names. The magazine has been a testing ground for new styles in fashion and photography--ones that later turn up in mainstream magazines, such as photographer David LaChapelle’s vibrantly colored celebrity portraits. Paper was ahead of the pack with Sofia Coppola’s fashion line, Milkfed, and introduced Leonardo di Caprio to its readers long before he ever set foot on “Titanic.”

Coinciding with Paper’s 15th anniversary, Hastreiter and Hershkovits have just published “From AbFab to Zen: Paper’s Guide to Pop Culture,” an encyclopedia of the icons, cultural hiccups and changing zeitgeist of the last decade-and-a-half.

The book, with an introduction by John Waters, is an imperfectly alphabetized compilation of the magazine’s best and baddest, a quick and irreverent reference that is user-friendly for the terminally unhip. Entries are short and even sweet. (“Bjork: a visionary musician and genetically predisposed fashion plate.” “Seattle: Where grunge was born, raised and buried.”)

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Nearly all the photos are from Paper’s archives.

“It’s turned out to be a pretty amazing period, starting with Orwell’s ‘1984’ to the millennium’s end of 1999,” said Hershkovits during an interview in L.A. last week. The 40-something editors were here for a book signing at the Virgin Megastore on Sunset Boulevard and a pool party for their pals at the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills. (Many of their guests made their names in New York’s downtown scene before migrating West, including artist Kenny Scharf and club impresario Billy Erb, both of whom are entries in the book.)

Leopard-fur fedora and shoulders above the revelers stood RuPaul. This new Angeleno appeared as he usually does when he is out of the spotlight, dressed as the dapper man he is, not the supermodel-of-the-world he plays in those Old Navy commercials.

“This book is the high school yearbook of the East Village,” he said, beaming. “You know Paper was the first national cover I got . . . and that kind of first a supermodel never forgets.”

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RuPaul kicks off the book’s “R” section. Curiously, another guest and cultural pioneer in his own right is absent from the guide. But Danny Elfman, frontman of new wavers Oingo Boingo and composer of many seminal soundtracks (“The Simpsons,” any Tim Burton film), said he didn’t mind.

“From Abfab to Zen” is the latest in a recent slew of pop culture compendiums. “Baby boomers and Gen Xers are reaching a point where they want to reflect on their lives,” said Alison Scott, head of the Popular Culture Library, the nation’s largest, at Bowling Green University in Ohio.

Of course, there’s that end-of-the-century thing, and the fact that pop culture is the focus of serious academic discussion. “What’s really new is the increasingly short time span for putting together these collections,” Scott said. “It’s almost like cultural Alzheimer’s.”

Perhaps it’s the symptom of a culture moving faster than a Pentium processor. As Hastreiter noted, “Who would’ve imagined a decade ago that a drag queen would be on TV selling ski vests to middle America?”