By The world has become a little less glamorous this week, as Bob Mackie, the iconic designer known for costuming countless divas in all manner of rhinestones, glitter, and feathers, died of pneumonia at age 87 on Monday. Best known for his long creative partnership with Cher—which began on the set of “The Sonny & Cher Show” and continued for the duration of her career—and his comedic costuming for “The Carol Burnett Show,” Mackie’s name has long been synonymous with sparkle, and his cultural impact is so great that even if you’re not a fashionista, you’d likely recognize his work.
Mackie was born in 1939, and his passion for fashion developed as he watched the Technicolor musicals of Golden Age Hollywood in his youth. After dropping out of art school, Mackie worked for designer Ray Aghayan, who became his partner from 1963 until his passing in 2011, and in one of his earliest jobs, he created the original sketch for Marilyn Monroe’s 1962 “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress (the dress itself was made by French designer Jean Louis).
Following this auspicious start, Mackie started designing for Mitzi Gaynor—the first of many stars he’d work with directly—in 1966. After seeing one of Gaynor’s stage shows, Carol Burnett hired Mackie for “The Carol Burnett Show,” and he stayed on for the comedy classic’s entire 11-year run, from 1967 to 1978, making dozens of creative and funny costumes for the comedian and her castmates each week. His most famous look for Burnett was a heavy gown made from curtains (rod included!) for the 1976 “Gone With the Wind” parody sketch “Went With the Wind.” Mackie’s idea to incorporate the curtain rod into the dress to enhance Burnett’s physical comedy made campy visual humor a touchstone of his prolific career.
It was on the set of “The Carol Burnett Show” that Mackie met Cher, his ultimate muse. In 2024, when I interviewed the designer (delightfully unpretentious and with a youthful, lively spirit even in his eighties) for Woman’s World, he recalled that the show’s producers and writers initially didn’t know what to do with the entertainer. Mackie immediately picked up on Cher’s star power. “I said, ‘She can be anything you want her to be. You write it, we’ll do it.’ And it worked,” he told me. “Every week, people would watch to see what she was going to wear. She played famous queens and courtesans of history and all these crazy parts. It was all comedy, and it was so fun.”
Mackie’s creativity and Cher’s charisma proved a winning combination, and he said, “I put her in anything and everything, and she took it right on. She really understood it even though she didn’t have any education about fashion.” Over-the-top style became a Cher signature, and Mackie later designed her notoriously revealing 1986 Oscars ensemble and bodysuit from the 1989 “If I Could Turn Back Time” music video. Mackie praised Cher for being game for anything—and he even admitted he occasionally had to tone her down! The designer dressed Cher into the ’00s and beyond, and in 2019, he won a Tony Award for costuming “The Cher Show,” a Broadway jukebox musical based on her personal and professional life. In a heartfelt X post, Cher wrote, “My dear Bob has gone up to heaven. Knowing him, he’s bringing Sequins, Beads, & his sketch pad. Good nite, sweet Prince.”
The list of celebrities Mackie has worked with is like a who’s who of the entertainment industry’s most fabulous: Diana Ross, Madonna, Tina Turner, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Dolly Parton, Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler, and Elton John (to name just a few) have all worn his sparkling confections. While he made his name working on the small screen and won nine Emmy Awards, he also made an impact in film, earning Best Costume Design Academy Award nominations for the Diana Ross-starring Billie Holiday biopic “Lady Sings the Blues” (1972); Barbra Streisand’s “Funny Girl” sequel, “Funny Lady” (1975); and the Steve Martin/Bernadette Peters musical “Pennies From Heaven” (1981).
His costumes enhanced the period aesthetics of these films immeasurably, and his regular work with their leading ladies led to an easygoing rapport behind the scenes. In their tributes, the actresses Mackie worked with have spoken highly of his kindness and the bold approach he took to fashion. Streisand recalled, “He designed one gorgeous outfit after another for me in ‘Funny Lady.’ He might continue designing creations for the angels,” while Peters called him “one of the most talented people you’d ever want to meet,” praising the way that “He could take something, you could do a run-through of something, and he would get an idea and take it to the nth degree . . . he was just brilliant, just brilliant. And lovely and kind.”
Bernadette Peters in “Pennies From Heaven.”
In a statement that alluded to a fundamental tension throughout Mackie’s career, Burnett said, “Sadness doesn’t come close to how I feel. I loved him very much. As for his genius, there are fashion designers who don’t do costumes and there are costume designers who don’t do fashion. Bob did it all. There was no one like him.”
Mackie designed both runway and off-the-rack fashion over the years (including a mainstream line for QVC and a collection of Barbie dolls), but the fashion world didn’t always take him seriously because of his costume background. As he told me, “Very often, what I do isn’t right for everybody. I love to see when a woman puts herself together in an interesting way, and I try to analyze every performer, because they’re not just ladies buying a dress. I’m not really in fashion as much as I am in costume design.”
In his vividly rendered fashion sketches, Mackie made his famous clients look like stylish superheroes, and Mackie’s designs are wonderfully emblematic of their eras, with costumes that embody ’70s disco chic and ’80s power dressing. In recent years, as vintage fashion has become increasingly popular on the red carpet, Mackie’s retro glam has earned a new following, with young stars like Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter, Zendaya, and Taylor Swift rocking glittering looks from his archive. He stayed in the public eye with a 2024 documentary, “Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion,” and a cameo in an episode of “Hacks” earlier this year.
In a time filled with bad news, doomscrolling, and an unfortunate resurgence of policing queer culture, Mackie’s lavish creations feel like a balm for the soul. The sparkles on a Mackie dress instantly transport us to a carefree, colorful world, and while he primarily worked with the rich and famous, he always believed glamour should be accessible.
As he told me at a preview event for an auction of his designs in 2025, “Glamour is having a good time getting dressed up and enjoying yourself, and looking a certain way or a way that you’ve been wanting to look. You don’t want to look foolish, but at the same time, you want to have fun.” Few designers have made fashion quite as fun as he did, and his dazzling body of work proved that sometimes too much can be just right.
