Bob Mackie spent more than six decades making sure some of the world’s brightest stars sparkled just a little brighter.
The legendary American costume designer, whose extraordinary imagination dressed everyone from Carol Burnett and Cher to Diana Ross, Tina Turner and Elton John, died Monday in Palm Springs, California. He was 87.
Mackie died from pneumonia, according to his publicist, leaving behind far more than closets filled with feathers, sequins, beads and rhinestones. His life’s work became part of the visual history of American entertainment, an unmistakable collection of glamour, humor and theatrical extravagance that accompanied some of the most memorable performers of the past 60 years.
Mackie never seemed particularly interested in making someone simply look nice. Nice was ordinary. He dressed people to make an entrance.
Sometimes that meant Cher appearing beneath towering feathers and shimmering crystals. Sometimes it meant Diana Ross wrapped in glamorous theatrical elegance. Sometimes it meant Tina Turner taking command of a stage in a costume designed to move right along with her. And sometimes it meant Carol Burnett walking down a staircase wearing a curtain, complete with the curtain rod still stretched across her shoulders.
That was the wonderful contradiction at the center of Mackie’s career. He could create breathtaking glamour and then happily use those same talents to get a laugh.
Born Robert Gordon Mackie in Monterey Park, California, in 1939, he grew up fascinated by the fantasy of Hollywood. He studied advertising and illustration at Pasadena City College and later attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, eventually finding his way into the Hollywood costume departments he had once admired from afar.
His career began quietly, with a pencil.
Mackie worked as a sketch artist for some of Hollywood’s most respected costume designers, including Edith Head and Jean Louis. In 1962, while working for Jean Louis, the young Mackie sketched a dress destined to become part of American history.
It was the sheer, crystal-covered gown Marilyn Monroe wore to Madison Square Garden when she sang Happy Birthday to President John F. Kennedy.
Mackie was barely beginning his career, yet his hand had already helped create one of the most recognizable dresses ever worn.
Television soon provided a much larger canvas.
His early work included The Judy Garland Show and a professional partnership with designer Ray Aghayan. In 1967, Mackie and Aghayan shared an Emmy for their costume work on Alice Through the Looking Glass, an early indication that the young designer who had started by drawing other people’s ideas was developing a style unmistakably his own.
Then came Carol Burnett.
Mackie joined The Carol Burnett Show and remained there throughout its 11 seasons, creating costumes for Burnett, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Tim Conway, Lyle Waggoner and the seemingly endless procession of celebrities who walked onto its stage.
The pace was relentless. Musical numbers, comedy sketches and guest appearances demanded new wardrobes week after week. Mackie somehow managed to make beautiful clothes funny and funny clothes beautiful.
His most famous example required an old curtain.
For the show’s celebrated Gone with the Wind parody, Went With the Wind!, Mackie designed an absurdly grand green curtain gown for Burnett. Rather than disguising where the material supposedly came from, he left the curtain rod sticking straight across her shoulders.
Burnett descended the staircase, the audience saw the rod, and television history had itself a costume.
The dress became so beloved that it eventually entered the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Mackie was simultaneously developing another partnership that would help define both his career and the appearance of modern celebrity.
Cher and Bob Mackie seemed made for one another.
Her fearlessness gave him room to experiment, and his imagination gave her clothes capable of keeping up with her. Together they created an astonishing succession of television, concert and red-carpet appearances built around feathers, beads, crystals, sheer fabrics, dramatic headdresses and silhouettes that could never be mistaken for anyone else’s work.
Their collaboration endured for decades.
Mackie dressed Cher through different eras of television and music, from her early variety-show years through concerts and major public appearances. His work eventually earned Emmys connected to Cher: Live in Concert and Cher: The Farewell Tour.
Yet Mackie’s world was much larger than one famous partnership.
Diana Ross wore Mackie. Tina Turner wore Mackie. Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler, Bernadette Peters, Mitzi Gaynor, Ann-Margret, Madonna, Dolly Parton, Whitney Houston, Pink and Elton John all became part of a remarkable collection of entertainers who trusted him with the way audiences would remember seeing them.
Those relationships helped turn Mackie into something unusual in the costume world: a designer whose name became nearly as recognizable as some of the celebrities he dressed.
Hollywood noticed the craftsmanship behind the spectacle.
Mackie received three Academy Award nominations for costume design, for Lady Sings the Blues, Funny Lady and Pennies From Heaven. Television brought more than 30 Emmy nominations and nine wins. In 2002, he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.
And he kept going.
Broadway eventually brought Mackie another of his profession’s highest honors when he designed the enormous wardrobe for The Cher Show. The musical required hundreds of costumes spanning the different periods of Cher’s life and career, giving Mackie the unusual assignment of revisiting a visual history he had personally helped create.
In 2019, at nearly 80 years old, Bob Mackie won the Tony Award for Best Costume Design of a Musical.
There was something beautifully appropriate about it. The young man who had once sat behind a drawing board sketching dresses for other designers was still being celebrated at the highest levels of his profession nearly 60 years later.
His imagination also escaped the boundaries of Hollywood.
Mackie developed ready-to-wear fashion and later became known to millions of collectors through his elaborate Bob Mackie Barbie dolls. The dolls carried the same sense of theatrical fantasy as his stage costumes, often appearing in extravagant gowns, feathers, jewels and dramatic headpieces.
For people who could never own an original Mackie costume, there was suddenly a tiny piece of his world sitting on a shelf.
Time did surprisingly little to diminish the appeal of his designs.
As younger generations of entertainers discovered Mackie’s archives, clothes created decades earlier returned to prominent stages and red carpets. Miley Cyrus, Zendaya and Taylor Swift were among the contemporary performers who embraced his work. Zendaya wore vintage Mackie while honoring Cher at the 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, placing another generation inside a design vocabulary Mackie had begun developing before she was born.
His life was not without profound sadness.
Mackie’s marriage to actress Marianne Nicholson, professionally known as Lulu Porter, ended in divorce. Their son, Robert Gordon Robin Mackie Jr., who became a makeup artist, died in 1993. Ray Aghayan, Mackie’s longtime professional and personal partner, died in 2011. Mackie is survived by a granddaughter and two great-granddaughters.
Through those losses and the enormous changes that swept through entertainment during his lifetime, Mackie continued doing what he had wanted to do since he was young: draw, design and create.
His career traveled through an almost unbelievable stretch of American popular culture. He had a hand in Marilyn Monroe’s famous presidential birthday dress. He helped define the visual comedy of Carol Burnett. He dressed Cher through decades of reinvention. He created glamour for Diana Ross and costumes capable of matching Tina Turner’s electricity onstage. He dressed Broadway, Hollywood and Barbie, then lived long enough to watch a new generation enthusiastically rediscover his work.
The rhinestones were never really the whole story.
Behind all that sparkle was an artist who understood performers. Mackie knew when a costume needed to be glamorous, when it needed to be outrageous and when it needed to make an audience laugh before a single word was spoken.
He also seemed to understand something wonderfully simple about show business.
There was already plenty of ordinary clothing in the world.
Bob Mackie made sure the stage had something else.