Bob Mackie, Who Dressed Carol Burnett and Cher Flamboyantly, Excelled at Old Hollywood Craftsmanship

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!”