She was born Marcia Weinraub on June 10, 1939 in the Bronx to Dorothy (Lautman) and Ralph Weinraub, a real estate agent known as Lefty. She attended New York University for three years, majored in retail and journalism (and won Miss New York University in 1959).
She worked as a buyer and fashion director for Gimbel’s department store, among others, and in the late 1960s opened a funky clothing boutique, Abracadabra, on the Upper East Side, whose decoration included a mirrored device with an erector set salvaged from an old amusement park. She met her longtime partner, Chris Vlaanderen, an actor turned contractor and previously named Christian Van der Put, when he helped her build a display for the store. He didn’t think the name Marcia suited her; to him she was more of an Annie. So she took that name, along with his last name, even though they were never married.
In 1988, Details was bought by Advance Publications, the publishing empire of the Newhouse family, which owns Vogue, among others, for a reported $2 million. Jonathan Newhouse was the publisher that first year, before moving to Paris in 1989 to oversee the company’s international titles.
Despite its popularity and influence, Details was struggling financially, though it had a paid print run of 100,000 at the time of sale. Mrs. Vlaanderen was fired two years later and the magazine was redesigned as a men’s publication, with James Truman, a former Vogue editor, as editor-in-chief. The magazine was closed in 2015.
In the 1990s, Mrs. Flanders and her family moved to Hollywood, where she reinvented herself as a real estate agent, though she didn’t drive, in partnership with her daughter, Rosie, who did. Her daughter survives her. Mr Vlaanderen died in 2007.
Decades never end cleanly, and the ’80s were no exception. By 1989, the inner-city ranks that Mrs. Flanders had so lovingly recorded had been decimated by AIDS. Mrs. Mueller died that year, along with thousands of others.
“We thought it would last forever,” said Mr. musto. “We thought the magazine would last forever.”
