Alongside the elegant Yves Saint Laurent, one often saw the slick, dark-haired Anne-Marie Muñoz—like her boss, always dressed in black. Though Muñoz remained mostly on the sidelines, she ran Saint Laurent’s design studio for 40 years and was one of his closest confidantes.
Muñoz began her career at Christian Dior, where she was hired as an apprentice in 1951, at 19, thanks to the recommendation of her well-connected uncle, the composer Henri Sauguet. Those were high-flying years at the house, its astonishing overnight success due to Dior’s 1947 “New Look” collection, with its rounded shoulders, cinched waists, and full skirts. Muñoz, however, was viewed as a spoiled apprentice who couldn’t sew. She spent her first seasons re-arranging rolls of fabric in the storerooms and discreetly taking sewing lessons.
When young Saint Laurent arrived at Dior, in 1955, he invited the lowly apprentice for a glass of anisette on the Champs-Élysées. It marked the start of a lifelong friendship. And when Dior died, in 1957, and Saint Laurent was chosen as his successor, Muñoz became his quiet anchor. In 1964, when he started his own house, it was only natural that she would go with him.
Muñoz raised her children, Carlos and Marie Muñoz-Yagüe, in the hard-partying world of 1970s Paris. They posed for the artist Claude Lalanne. Karl Lagerfeld, Carlos’s godfather, always arrived with treats. And Saint Laurent was ever present, a godly figure in the household. In their free time, Carlos and Marie re-created the futuristic jumpsuits Saint Laurent designed for Sylvie Vartan on dolls for school projects.
Carlos eventually picked up a camera, and by 15 he was working in art-house cinemas; later, he became an assistant on film productions. In 1986, at 20, Muñoz-Yagüe was ready when he received an important call from Pierre Bergé: Could he create a montage of Saint Laurent for a retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs? Muñoz-Yagüe made a Soviet-style 26-minute short film. For the next 16 years, until 2002, he would be the house photographer for Yves Saint Laurent.
Muñoz-Yagüe’s book Yves Saint Laurent: Inside Out presents many previously unseen and intimate photographs of daily life in the designer’s atelier. Shots of stars such as Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Christy Turlington are paired with behind-the-scenes outtakes of the elusive man himself, cigarette dangling from his lower lip.
“Yves placed women at the center of his personal theater,” Muñoz-Yagüe writes in the introduction, “hiding behind a deliberately unobtainable image of virility.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail
