San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Details magazine founder covered art, fashion
Annie Flanders, the ardent, russet-haired founding editor of Details magazine, the proudly independent chronicle of downtown Manhattan in the 1980s, died March 10 at an assisted living facility in Los Angeles. She was 82.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said writer Martha Frankel, a friend and former Details contributor.
In the post-disco era of the early 1980s, a combustible mix of art, music and fashion erupted out of the nightclubs, boutiques and art galleries found mostly below 14th Street. That was Flanders’ territory, chaotic but symbiotic, and its tribes were her people. And though that world was tiny, its cultural impact — the artwork of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the fashion designs of Isabel Toledo, Betsey Johnson and Stephen Sprouse, and even the shenanigans of a sassy club kid named Madonna — loomed large, and lingered.
“It was this mad collision,” Simon Doonan, longtime creative director of Barneys New York, said in a phone interview. “There was a feeling that anything was possible. There were a couple of grown-ups in the room. Annie was one of them. She was able to make sense of the chaos and shape it into a magazine.”
Flanders didn’t invent downtown; it was a real place with real people, said Ruben Toledo, the Cuban-born artist and husband of Isabel Toledo, whose exquisite, artfully feminine clothes were first shown in Flanders’ magazine. “But Annie was able to stand back and see the glamour in it and sell tickets to it,” he said.
“In a way,” he added, “she formed that ’80s culture, which became not just an American phenomenon but an international one. We who were in the trenches were just too muddy and dirty to see it ourselves.”
Flanders’ background was in fashion. She had worked in retail and spent a few years in Ethiopia jump-starting a clothing manufacturing effort there before, in the 1970s, overseeing the style pages of The SoHo News, the upstart competitor to the other local counterculture bible, The Village Voice, until it folded in 1982.
With her shock of red hair and New York accent, Flanders was more Auntie Mame than Diana Vreeland — she was celebratory, not hortatory. She had a great nose, said Doonan, “for charismatic misfits and creative people.”
Flanders gathered many of them to start Details in the spring of 1982, funding the effort with $6,000 of her savings. The magazine’s co-founders included Stephen Saban, an acerbic British writer, nightclub enthusiast and SoHo News alum; Ronnie Cooke Newhouse — then Ronnie Cooke, before she married into the Newhouse publishing family — who was fresh out of art school; and Lesley Vinson, a young graphic designer who had laid out Flanders’ pages at The SoHo News.
The debut cover of Details looked like a slab of marble with the title carved into it, and at first the magazine’s covers were embellished with just one elegant portrait shot in black and white (which fit the budget but also the aesthetic). “Ephemera written in stone” was the graphic concept, said Vinson, the magazine’s art director.
Initial circulation was 10,000 — many copies were given away to people whose names were culled from the guest lists of nightclubs, which offered them in exchange for free or discounted ads. In the beginning, Details had no newsstand sales. The staff held mailing parties to stuff envelopes. Billy Idol dropped by one late night to lend a hand.
Details had a motto: “A party in a magazine.” “We go out so you don’t have to,” Saban liked to say.
Staff members rolled in to work in the late afternoon, a schedule suited to their nighttime behaviors; Flanders started her day at 4 p.m. (To streamline her evening routine, she often threw on a scarlet wig, which she named Mildred and which lived in her office.)
“We are not an intellectual magazine,” she told Judy Klemesrud of The New York Times in 1985, the year Details won an award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. “We are strictly for people who have an artistic bent, or are fun-loving people. We represent a way of life: people who really like to laugh, have a good time, go out and care, at least some of the time, about what they wear.”
Saban covered nightlife, tartly. (Patrick McMullan took the photos that accompanied Saban’s column.) Cookie Mueller, the doomed avant-garde model, actor and mordant writer, was the art critic. “All of it is worthless,” she once wrote of the scene she inhabited, “but all of it is true, and that is something.”