Bob Mackie died yesterday in Palm Springs. He was 87. The man who put Cher in feathers, Carol Burnett in a curtain rod, and Elton John in a sequined Dodgers uniform spent six decades proving one idea: clothes on a stage are not decoration. They are the show.
Cher put it simply years ago: without him, she would have been “a peacock without feathers.” After the news broke, she wrote, “My dear Bob has gone up to heaven. Knowing him, he’s bringing Sequins, Beads, & his sketch pad. Good nite sweet Prince.”
That was the whole partnership. She wanted to be seen. He knew how to make sure nobody looked away.
A kid who learned glamour from the movies
Robert Gordon Mackie was born March 24, 1939, in Monterey Park, California. His parents split when he was young, and he was raised largely by his grandparents in Alhambra. The escape hatch was Technicolor. He soaked up MGM musicals, showgirls, and the idea that a costume could turn a person into a myth.
He studied at Pasadena City College and the Chouinard Art Institute, then quit school in 1961 to sketch for the old Hollywood masters: Edith Head and Jean Louis. One early assignment was the drawing for the flesh-colored, rhinestone-crusted gown Marilyn Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy in 1962. Jean Louis got the credit. Mackie got the education.
In 1963 he became assistant to costume designer Ray Aghayan, who would be his professional partner and life partner until Aghayan’s death in 2011. Together they won the first Emmy ever given for costume design, for the 1966 special Alice Through the Looking Glass.
The real break came that same year, when Mitzi Gaynor hired him for her Las Vegas revue. Dance, comedy, and showgirl sparkle in one job. Carol Burnett saw the work, hired him for her new CBS variety show in 1967, and kept him for all eleven seasons.
Television’s sultan of sequins
On The Carol Burnett Show, Mackie was a factory and a punchline artist at the same time. Estimates run as high as 17,000 costumes. Some weeks he turned out 60 or 70 looks. The most famous was the “Went with the Wind!” sketch: Burnett as a Scarlett O’Hara who makes a gown from the drapes — rod still attached across the shoulders. That dress now lives at the Smithsonian.
Burnett later said the difference between Mackie and almost everyone else was simple. Plenty of people design fashion. Plenty design costumes. “Bob did it all. There was no one like him.”
He had a working philosophy that sounded like a dare: “A woman who wears my clothes is not afraid to be noticed.”
Then Cher walked in
Sonny and Cher guest-starred on Burnett’s show in 1967. Mackie later admitted his first thought was not promising. They were still in the fur-vest, stone-face era. Then Cher came in for a fitting. He saw the body, the face, and the willingness. “She can be anything you want her to be,” he told the writers. “You write it, we’ll do it.”
When The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour launched in 1971, he became her costume man. The wardrobe budget was reported at about $30,000 an episode. She might change 15 to 30 times in an hour. Viewers tuned in for the jokes. They stayed for the clothes. Cher later said a lot of the audience was there “to see what outrageous and provocative costumes she’d wear.”
He put her in queens, courtesans, showgirls, and barely-there illusion gowns. She called herself his Barbie. He called her the perfect canvas. She had the long waist, the nerve, and no interest in dressing like a “serious actress” if that meant disappearing.
The 1974 Met Gala made the partnership public. Cher arrived on Mackie’s arm in a sheer beaded “naked dress” with feathered sleeves and hem. It was illusion, beads, and almost nothing else. Vogue noticed. Time put her in a similar look on the cover. Some cities banned the issue. The country got the message: this was not quiet fashion. This was television glamour walking into a museum.
The revenge dress
The look that still owns the highlight reel came in March 1986. Cher had been passed over for an Oscar nomination for Mask. The Academy asked her to present Best Supporting Actor instead. She was furious. She called Mackie.
What they built was not a gown. It was a statement: black stretch pants, a bejeweled loincloth, knee-high boots, a chain-link top, and a feathered Mohawk headdress a head-and-a-half taller than she was. Jane Fonda introduced her with, “Wait’ll you see what’s gonna come out here.” Cher stepped out and said, “As you can see, I did receive my Academy booklet on how to dress like a serious actress.”
Mackie had warned her she would upstage the winner. She did not care. Don Ameche, who took the award for Cocoon, later said that if she had not worn that outfit, his picture would not have been in every paper the next day either.
Two years later she won Best Actress for Moonstruck — in another Mackie, a sheer, jeweled mesh gown. The circle closed. The woman Hollywood tried to scold for dressing wrong had taken the statue in beads.
Not every Mackie-Cher look was one he loved. The 1989 “If I Could Turn Back Time” video bodysuit — the so-called “seatbelt” mesh, shot on the USS Missouri — embarrassed him. He told her not to credit him. She wore it anyway. The audience never forgot it. That was the partnership in miniature: he drew the line, she stepped over it, and the camera ate it up.
He stayed with her through Las Vegas residencies, the Farewell Tour, Classic Cher, and Broadway’s The Cher Show, which won him the 2019 Tony for Best Costume Design in a Musical. He was 80. He told the room it was encouraging.
Everybody else wanted the same heat
Cher was the muse. She was not the only client.
Tina Turner got chain-fringe and lamé wings. Diana Ross got movie clothes for Lady Sings the Blues and decades of concert gowns. Elton John asked for “a costume like Cher wears” and received, among other things, the sequined Los Angeles Dodgers uniform from the 1975 Dodger Stadium shows, plus Donald Duck and Mozart. Dolly Parton, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, RuPaul, and later Miley Cyrus, Zendaya, and Sabrina Carpenter all wore the archive. Taylor Swift even pulled a Mackie showgirl look from Jubilee! for The Life of a Showgirl.
On film he earned three Oscar nominations: Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Funny Lady (1975), and Pennies from Heaven (1981). On television he won nine Emmys. In 2002 he entered the Television Academy Hall of Fame. In 2016 the CFDA gave him the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award.
Mattel hired him for collectible Barbies starting in the late 1980s. He pushed the company toward dolls that looked like more than one kind of woman, then dressed them like Vegas headliners. Even the toy aisle got the Mackie treatment: more sparkle, less apology.
He also designed for the Las Vegas spectacles Hallelujah Hollywood and Jubilee! — hundreds of costumes, the old Ziegfeld idea rebuilt for the Strip.
The man behind the beads
Mackie himself dressed like a prep-school teacher: khakis, button-downs, no sequins. People who met him expected Liberace. They got a quiet draftsman who could sketch a showgirl in minutes.
He married singer-actress Lulu Porter in 1960. They divorced in 1963. Their son, Robin, a makeup artist, died of AIDS-related illness in 1993. Mackie and Aghayan were together for nearly fifty years. He is survived by a granddaughter and two great-granddaughters.
He died of pneumonia on September 14, 2026, in Palm Springs. Cher had been with him in his last days. “We were laughing, talking about everything,” she said. “I know that he’s someplace better — designing dresses.”
Why the clothes still work
Mackie never pretended his work was minimalism. He came out of variety television, when a costume had about thirty seconds to land a joke, a character, or a gasp before the next cue. Beads had to read on a cathode-ray tube. Feathers had to move under hot lights. A midriff had to be a plot point.
That is why the 1970s still belong to him as much as to the records. The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and The Carol Burnett Show were living catalogs of American glamour: camp, sex, comedy, and craft stitched onto the same Saturday night. Disco and funk wanted bodies that flashed. Mackie gave them the flash.
Younger stars keep raiding the closet because the formula has not expired. Put a fearless performer in something that looks impossible. Let the audience argue about taste. Tomorrow they will still remember the picture.
Mackie said the quiet part out loud. Fashion, to him, was often boring. Costume was the job. The job was to make a human being unforgettable for the length of a song, a sketch, or a walk to the podium.
Cher did the rest. She wore the beads like they were denim. That was the trick. He built the peacock. She already knew how to strut.
