Bob Mackie Was Serious About Sequins
In 2001, when the fashion designer Bob Mackie was sixty-two years old, he attended the C.F.D.A. Fashion Awards in New York—a swanky annual ceremony put on by the Council of Fashion Designers of America which is more or less the Oscars of the schmatta business—to receive an honorary prize for “fashion exuberance.” No other designer had won this award before, and no other designer has won it since. It was an accolade invented for Mackie, who died on Monday, of pneumonia, at the age of eighty-seven. Mackie viewed the kudos with a wry sense of humor: “They wanted to give me something, but they didn’t know what to do with me,” Mackie later told Vogue. Grateful to be recognized by his peers, he was also aware that his work—glamorous, high camp, often painstakingly bedazzled ensembles created for Hollywood stars and popular musical artists—granted him a tenuous place in the traditionally frosty (and minimalist-leaning) realms of high fashion. Eighteen years later, in 2019, the C.F.D.A. honored Mackie with a far more conventional plaudit—a lifetime-achievement award—but, in the end, the kookier superlative may have fit him the best. As Jan Strimple, a model, fashion-show producer, and longtime client of his, once observed, the award “sums up everything Mackie, because he’s an original. You can’t ignore his presence and his success even if he’s not your cup of tea.”
Mackie’s clothes were, in fact, exuberance embodied. His designs—particularly those he made for such loyal collaborators as Carol Burnett, Cher, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner, Bernadette Peters, and Diana Ross—were meant, he said, “for the woman who is not afraid to be noticed.” (He could easily have added men to that adage: he dressed Elton John in head-to-toe plumage and spangles during the singer’s extravagant “Rocket Man” period.) Mackie always said that he grew up believing that the singer and actress Carmen Miranda, who was known for wearing vibrant headdresses made out of tropical fruit, was the pinnacle of beauty, and his clothes reflected this over-the-top taste: he worked in bright, punchy colors (tangerine, Capri blue, electric watermelon) and he never shied away from adding embellishments, be they feathers, sequins, rhinestones, tassels, or swaths of diaphanous gold lamé.
Despite the almost psychedelic sense of excess, there was also a clear Old Hollywood sensibility to his work. He got his start working as a sketch artist under the formidable mid-century costume designers Edith Head and Jean Louis, and he drew direct inspiration from the look of classic showgirls of both the Busby Berkeley and Las Vegas Strip variety. But Mackie had an impish streak that was all his own, and an irreverent sense of humor that allowed his clothes to serve as daring visual provocations, or even as punch lines. He was unafraid, for example, to put Cher, whom he began dressing in the late sixties, in slinky outfits that bared her midriff or dipped dangerously low around her tailbone. Cher became notorious, on her 1975 variety program, “The Cher Show,” for stepping out onstage in front of a live audience in a shawl or oversized coat—designed, like all her costumes during this era, by Mackie—only to rip off her outerwear, revealing something tantalizing beneath. (Under every bolero was a bandeau top or a set of bejewelled nipple pasties, just waiting to break free.) These nightly unveilings became a big part of Cher’s early success—she was like a disco Scheherazade, captivating viewers who tuned in simply for a glimpse. Cher later took her partnership with Mackie to a new extreme when, for the 1986 Oscars, she asked him to make her a look that would double as a kind of wearable kiss-off to the Academy for not nominating her for her work in the film “Mask.” Together, they concocted a glittery black gothic fantasia—featuring a lattice brassiere and a porcupine-esque spiky headdress—that hovered between ebullient silliness and bad taste. Cher may not have won that night (she had to wait until 1988, when she accepted her Oscar for “Moonstruck” in another Mackie original, a nearly transparent black-lace column gown), but she nevertheless dominated the headlines. As Joe McFate, Mackie’s design partner of twenty-six years, told me, “People hadn’t seen her in one of those outrageous get-ups—Bob called them get-ups—in a while. But for years afterwards that dress got reprinted every Oscar season. It still does!”
Of course, what made Mackie’s clothes so successful, beyond their glorious shock value, was their undeniable quality. Mackie was, first and foremost, a supreme tailor. He was born in Los Angeles in 1939, the son of a banker and a homemaker who divorced when he was young. He was raised primarily by his grandmother Bessie, and spent much of what he described as a lonesome childhood absorbing the escapist fantasies of the movies. “When I was about 10 or 11 years old,” he told Vogue, “I went to see An American in Paris, and when the ballet came on, I just thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I thought, ‘Wow! This is beautiful. I bet I could do this.’ Thank God when you’re young you’re kind of stupid and you just go forward and keep pushing.”
Mackie studied design at the Chouinard Art Institute, where Edith Head had been trained, before dropping out early to work on studio films directly, assisting costume mavericks like Head herself. As a budding sketch artist, he learned precisely how garments are constructed, and, even at a young age, he was generating bold ideas on the page. In 1962, he created, for the designer Jean Louis, the sketch for a beige marquisette gown covered in two thousand five hundred rhinestones; Louis then made the dress for Marilyn Monroe to wear while she performed a cheeky salute to John F. Kennedy at his star-studded birthday celebration in Madison Square Garden. (One has to think that Mackie understood the mesmerizing effect that singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in a shimmering skintight nude look might have on a crowd.) The gown went on to become the most expensive item of clothing ever sold at auction, fetching nearly five million dollars. To this day, it holds up perfectly—Kim Kardashian even took it out of the archive to wear it to the Met Gala, in 2022, to the slight dismay of Mackie, who thought that the dress should remain Monroe’s alone.
Mackie’s abiding dressmaking philosophy was that, no matter how wacky an outfit might be, it needed to be well constructed. “You can’t make these crazy-ass clothes unless they’re beautifully made, and hopefully perfectly proportioned for the woman,” he said. (Cher put it this way: “Bob and I are both perfectionists when it comes to fit. We’re never satisfied until every inch is perfect.”) Mackie’s clients had to do high kicks and shimmy-shakes, and even topple down staircases in his creations. As Bernadette Peters told me, “They are made to last. I still have dresses he made that I wear constantly, like a lavender gown that I wear in my shows, and every time I put it on it looks better than the last time. They just do not fall apart.”
I was thinking about the longevity of Mackie’s clothes when I heard that he had died, because I’d spent a great deal of time poring over his designs when I was reporting my recent Profile of Carol Burnett. Cher may have been Mackie’s most glamorous muse, but Burnett was his first long-term sartorial partner, and together they created some of the most indelible comedy moments ever captured on television.
When Burnett, who at the time was about to launch her own weekly variety hour on CBS, invited Mackie to her home to interview him for the job of costume designer, he was all of twenty-eight years old, though, as Burnett once put it, “he looked about twelve.” They connected through a shared love of classic movies and the melodramatic divas of the big screen, like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Burnett hired Mackie on the spot, and soon he was making between sixty and seventy costumes per week for the show. (That added up, over its eleven-season run, to nearly seventeen thousand individual outfits.)
What made Mackie and Burnett such ideal co-conspirators was that they both shared an unwavering commitment to making a comedic bit land. Burnett, for her part, threw herself audaciously into her characters, her gangly limbs flying akimbo. But her work was undoubtedly elevated by Mackie’s mischievous sensibility, and by his instincts for visual gags. It was Mackie’s idea, Burnett told me, to add the curtain rod to her dress in the famous “Went with the Wind” sketch, in which she plays a daffy belle named Starlett O’Hara. (That dress, which now sits in the Smithsonian, was made to look as if she had pulled a set of drapes directly onto her body, the rod sitting across her shoulders like a yoke; when another character comments on the look, she quips, “I saw it in the window and I just couldn’t resist it.”) It was also Mackie’s idea, when Burnett played a delusional aging film star named Nora Desmond, to fill a pair of socks with rice and sling them over her shoulders, so that her breasts swung to and fro like fuzzy dice hanging from a rearview mirror.
I was introduced to Mackie in the spring of 2025, when he and Burnett met up at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles to reminisce about the good old days. The night before, Burnett had attended a screening at the Directors Guild of America of the documentary “Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion,” about Mackie’s life and work, and had sat on a panel afterward along with some of Mackie’s other clients: Cher, RuPaul, and the pop star Pink. At the Peninsula, the two friends sat across from each other at a small round table near a sunny window. Burnett reached out to squeeze Mackie’s hand. Mackie wore his standard uniform of khakis, a starched white Brooks Brothers oxford shirt, and a navy blazer. “You always look so sharp,” she said.
“You know, Bob, I remember early on, I was going to do a lot of stunts, like jumping out of a window,” Burnett recalled. “And I said, ‘You know, Bob, when I do these stunts, I should be wearing slacks.’ ”
“But I said no!” Mackie interjected. “You should wear a very tight skirt and heels. It’s more vulnerable as a woman, and funnier. It gives you a chance to use the most amazing legs and knees and feet and do crazy stuff, which in pants doesn’t mean anything.”
“And that made all the difference,” Burnett said.
“I was just protecting your shtick,” Mackie said, with a grin.
On Monday afternoon, I called up Burnett, who has been having a distressing few weeks. Her good friend Dolly Parton died recently, followed by her good friend Tim Curry. When I reached her to talk about Mackie, she sounded unlike her usually chipper self at first. But then, turning to the subject of Mackie, she perked up again. “There are costume designers who don’t do fashion, and fashion designers who don’t do costumes, but Bob did both,” she said. “He’d sometimes beg us to keep a sketch that wasn’t working in rehearsal, because he’d say, ‘Wait for the costumes. It’s going to work.’ And then the audience would scream with laughter.”
These days, Mackie’s designs are in new demand among young celebrities, many of whom have come to realize that beneath all of the feathers and fringe, he made intricate, one-of-a-kind garments of rare craftsmanship. (According to McFate, Diana Vreeland once told Mackie that his workshop, where he and his team hand-sewed every bugle bead, was the closest place she’d seen in America to a European couture atelier.) Zendaya, Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Sabrina Carpenter have all worn archival Mackie on the red carpet and onstage. In 2020, a year after his C.F.D.A. Lifetime Achievement Award, Mackie won his first Tony, for making the costumes for “The Cher Show” on Broadway. His legacy has been cemented well beyond mere exuberance. Still, Mackie’s impact on fashion may be best characterized by the fact that the women he worked with for decades continue to wear his clothes.
“I still have sequin jackets that Bob made me,” Burnett said. “Some of them are thirty or forty years old, but they never go out of style.” ♦