A Financial Times Book of the Year: An intimate exploration of Yves Saint Laurent’s creative world, captured by photographer – and son of the couturier’s right-hand woman, Anne-Marie Muñoz – Carlos Muñoz-Yagüe.

Yves Saint Laurent: Inside Out presents an extraordinarily intimate insight into a fascinating world of creativity in the latter, sumptuous phase of Saint Laurent’s career, between 1989 and his final collection in 2002.

The book offers a comprehensive and multi-faceted exploration of the life of an haute couture house: from informal, atmospheric portraits of Yves Saint Laurent at work in his studio, drawing and creating, to the behind-the-scenes work of the ‘petites mains’ in the ateliers, the skilled army of artisans whose activity is rarely documented. The house’s world-famous models also feature, captured during pre-collection fittings in the house’s grandiose salons and in electric backstage moments before the shows.

Private archive materials – letters, documents, drawings, and ephemera – that situate the protagonists and give context to the unique position that the young Carlos enjoyed as a ‘fly on the wall’ in this rarefied universe are also included in the book, and published here for the first time.

A moving and visually stunning tribute to the iconic Yves Saint Laurent house as you’ve never seen it before, Yves Saint Laurent: Inside Out will be a must-have for fashion and photography fans.

'There are many books about famed French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, but few have the unprecedented backstage access as this one... It captures the energy and spirit of the Paris fashion scene, and how important the designer was for his time' - Forbes
'Impossibly chic... Offers a backstage tour to more than two decades of the late designer's creative world with all the louche Parisian glamour and half-dressed supermodels that access implies' - The New York Times

Carlos Muñoz-Yagüe is a photographer and documentary filmmaker. Philippe Garner is an internationally acknowledged authority on photography and 20th-century decorative arts and design. A former deputy chairman of Christie’s auction house, he has written extensively on these subjects and most notably on the great photographers of fashion. Garner received the Royal Photographic Society’s award for Outstanding Service to Photography in 2011.