She was born Marcia Weinraub on June 10, 1939 in the Bronx to Dorothy (Lautman) and Ralph Weinraub, a realtor known as Lefty. She attended New York University for three years, studying retail and journalism (and winning Miss New York University in 1959).
She worked as a buyer and fashion director for department store Gimbels, among other emporia, then opened a funky clothing boutique, Abracadabra, on the Upper East Side in the late 1960s, the decor of which involved a contraption. Mirror mount salvaged from an old amusement park. She met her longtime partner, Chris Flanders, an actor-turned-entrepreneur formerly named Christian Van der Put, when he helped her build a window display for the store. He didn’t think the name Marcia suited him; to him, she was more of an Annie. She therefore adopted this name, as well as his surname, although they never married.
In 1988, Details was purchased by Advance Publications, the publishing empire of the Newhouse family, which owns Vogue, among other glossy titles, for $2 million. Jonathan Newhouse was the publisher for the first year, before moving to Paris in 1989 to oversee the house’s international titles.
Despite its popularity and influence, Details struggled financially, although at the time of its sale it had a paid circulation of 100,000 copies. Ms Flanders was fired two years later and the magazine was redesigned as a men’s publication, with James Truman, a former Vogue editor, as editor. The magazine was closed in 2015.
In the 1990s, Ms Flanders and her family moved to Hollywood, where she reinvented herself as a real estate agent, though she didn’t drive, working with her daughter, Rosie, who did. His daughter survives him. Mr. Flanders died in 2007.
Decades never end cleanly, and the 80s were no exception. In 1989, the ranks of the inner city world that Mrs. Flanders had so lovingly chronicled had been decimated by AIDS. Ms. Mueller died that year, as did thousands of others.
“We thought it would go on forever,” Musto said. “We thought the magazine would last forever.”