Six decades of Bob Mackie’s showstopping designs are celebrated in a new auction, and his glamorous oeuvre is once again in the spotlight
Words by BOOTH MOORE
Every inch of Bob Mackie’s colorful Palm Springs house is covered with souvenirs of a life well lived: hand-carved wooden banana trees from Bali, Pacific Northwest masks stacked like totems, and so many tchotchkes that — surprise! —they’re even inside the kitchen cabinets.
Global maximalism feels right for the legendary costume designer, now 86. “When I’m walking around in the stores, I always see something I can’t live without,” he says, adding that the Palm Springs Vintage Market and Michaels (for art supplies) are regular stops closer to home.
Bob Mackie–designed Barbies pose on a shelf packed with research books, including Paul Colin’s lithographs of Josephine Baker, a history of the American musical, and Jimmy Nelson’s photographs of the customs and costumes of Indigenous communities. He’s also surrounded by personal mementos, including photographs of his partner and collaborator, Ray Aghayan, who died in 2011; his grandchildren; and the legendary performers who made him famous, including Cher, Carol Burnett, and Diana Ross.
For Mackie, whose career has spanned more than six decades, from Hollywood’s studio system to Madonna and Elton John to the social media age, the magic has never stopped. But a new generation recently discovered the transformative power of his archival costumes, with Miley Cyrus rocking the 2024 Grammys stage in a circa-2002 Mackie silver fringed dress with bare midriff, Taylor Swift introducing Life of a Showgirl in his silver-spangled Las Vegas “Jubilee” look, and Sabrina Carpenter making her debut at the Grand Ole Opry in a strip dress he originally designed for Ann-Margret.
“Years ago, no one wanted that stuff. Then one or two people wanted it, and suddenly everyone did,” Mackie says, beaming at the mention of Cyrus, who wooed him with flowers and ended up buying at auction the dress she wore to the Grammys. “We don’t just loan out clothes for people to try on; we have to fit them,” he says, adding that when they worked together, “[Cyrus] did the whole number for us. She showed us her choreography. We put the dress on her, and honest to God, we moved one hook, and that was it. It fit her like it was made for her.”
Carpenter, too, has embraced the Mackie spirit. “She could spin, she could do all this stuff,” he says of her performance in Nashville. “In her mind, I’m sure she was seeing Ann-Margret or Tina [Turner] in one of those strip dresses. It gave her a whole new way of thinking.” And then there’s Swift. “We had no control over how those pieces were worn or how she got them,” Mackie says, explaining that he doesn’t own his costumes from “Jubilee,” which ran from 1981 to 2016 at Bally’s Hotel in Las Vegas. Still, he was delighted to see her wear the diamond-inspired look, especially because her team had approached him to design for her before, but he wasn’t able to do so in the time allotted.
With his intergenerational appeal at an all-time high, it’s an opportune moment to open up his archive to Julien’s Auctions, which in June held a $5 million sale of Princess Diana’s wardrobe. He’s preparing to let go of some of his signature pieces — including Cher’s nude-illusion look from a 1978 TV special and a gold-and-silver chain fringe bodysuit with pleated gold lamé wings Turner wore at her 1977 Caesar’s Palace residency in Las Vegas.
“So many people want to own something a person performed in — it isn’t just girls.”
“When we put things up for auction, we try to pick things that would amuse people to own,” he says. “So many people want to own something that a person has worn and performed in — it becomes very special. And it isn’t just girls. There are a lot of men out there with mannequins in their living rooms.”
Mackie was born in Monterey Park and raised by his grandparents in Inglewood, not far from Hollywood Park racetrack and the airport. His childhood seemed as if it was one long audition for the dream factory. “I went to so many movies as a child — that was always where I wanted to be,” he says. “I never missed a musical, and I always loved movies about show business — how they’d all get on a train and go off to Cleveland, then Chicago. Before you know it, they were playing the Palace.” Cyd Charisse’s dance moves, Betty Grable’s legs, Carmen Miranda’s tropical flamboyance — they all made an impression. “She was my favorite,” he says of Miranda.
As a boy, he drew constantly, replicating costumes of chorus girls and movie queens. By his early 20s, he was studying on scholarship at Chouinard Art Institute, now part of CalArts, when restlessness got the better of him. “I finally just said, ‘You know, I need to make some money. I’m 21, this is silly.’” He quit school and took a job as a sketch artist with Frank Thompson at Paramount Studios.
One day, Edith Head — Hollywood’s reigning costume queen, and Paramount’s head designer for nearly 30 years — walked in. “She looked at my sketch and said, ‘That’s pretty good.’ Then she asked, ‘Do you know how to do strippers?’ ” Mackie says, laughing. “I said, ‘Yeah, I bet I could.’ ”
He had started his research fresh out of high school. “There was this burlesque house half a block from where I worked at Bullock’s department store downtown. I walked in, and there was Tempest Storm…with long red hair and white, white skin. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is good,’ ” he says of the famous midcentury burlesque performer whose breasts were said to have been insured for $1 million by Lloyd’s of London. He loved the bawdiness, and it was the beginning of a visual education in the glamour, humor, and sex appeal that would become signatures of his designs for stage and screen.
By the early 1960s, Mackie’s sketches had caught the attention of Aghayan, who invited him to work on The Judy Garland Show at CBS. “Before I knew it, there I was in the audience watching Barbra Streisand, Ethel Merman, and Judy Garland singing together,” Mackie says. “As far as I was concerned, I was in show business.”
It was the start of a long career in television, most famously with The Carol Burnett Show, where his genius for visual comedy shined. “I didn’t expect to be able to do any comedy,” he says. “Then I’d read the script and I’d talk to Carol — ‘What if you wore this, or what if you did that? And don’t black that tooth out; black out the one in the back so when you smile they’ll see it.’ They were the stupidest things.”
“Raquel Welch said, ‘I want a dress that Tina Turner might wear.’ A week later, Tina called me: ‘I have to have that dress.’ ”
He still remembers their surreal first meeting, when Burnett was living in a home that had belonged to Grable, one of his idols. “Carol said, ‘In the first show I fall out of an upstairs window — I’d better wear pants.’ And I said, ‘Oh no, you’re a lady. You should wear a very tight skirt. Nobody has funnier knees or elbows than you. You know how to use your body.’ ” Burnett became more than a muse. “There are certain people that you have so much in common with that before you know it, they’re one of your best friends,” he says. “Carol was one of the first.”
If Burnett made him a television legend, Cher made him an icon. Their first meeting was in 1967, when she and Sonny Bono were guests on The Carol Burnett Show. “She said to me, ‘One day I’d like to have a dress with beads on it like that,’ ” Mackie recalls of her admiring his rack of costumes backstage. “I said, ‘Well, we can do that. Just call me when you’re ready.’ She said, ‘We’re broke right now, but we’ll get there.’ ”
They got there. From her sequined gowns and feathered headdresses on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour to the daring nude illusion dress she wore to the 1974 Met Gala, Mackie’s designs turned Cher into the ultimate pop deity. “It was nothing like it is now,” he says about attending the Met Gala with Cher. “She walked in, and suddenly the empty front room at the Met was full of photographers — maybe 100 of them. Nobody knew what to think.”
By February, she was wearing the same gown on the cover of Time magazine. “She wasn’t afraid of anything,” Mackie says. “Nobody looked better in the tiniest bikini than she did. Once the censors came running in right before we taped and said, ‘This is disgusting — you can see her underboob!’ And I said, ‘Well, why don’t you have her stand on her head and call it cleavage.’ That line ended up in The Cher Show on Broadway [in 2018]. I was delighted.”
Cher’s collaboration with Mackie would become one of fashion’s longest-running creative partnerships, stretching from the 1960s through her Las Vegas residencies to one of the most famous Oscars dresses of all time. He still maintains some pieces from her private wardrobe. “I met her when she was 19,” he says.
Then there was Turner. “First time I saw her was at Studio One with Ike and the Ikettes,” Mackie says. “I was just visiting, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, who is that?’ ” Before long they were working together. There was a friendly rivalry of sparkle and skin among his divas. “They were always trying to one-up each other,” Mackie says, smiling.
He tells a story about Raquel Welch, who called asking for costumes for a nightclub act. “She said, ‘In this one rock number, I want a dress that Tina Turner might wear.’ I said, ‘Well, what do you think that looks like?’ She said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Like a cavewoman would wear it,’ ” he says. They made her a plunging root beer–colored sequin halter dress with sheer cutouts. “A week later, Tina saw the photo in a magazine and called me: ‘I have to have that dress.’ ”
“Years ago, no one wanted that stuff. Then one or two people wanted it, and suddenly everyone did. ”
Mackie adored Welch, even if she was “a little high-maintenance.” He recalls one time she came to the studio for a fitting. “We fitted and fitted and stared and stared…and I said, ‘Well, I think we’re done now. I think we’re looking really good.’ And she says, ‘Yeah, can I just stay here for a while?’ ” Two hours later, she was still staring at herself in the mirror. “But you know, in her life, that was very important,” Mackie says.
So why the sudden resurgence among the world’s biggest stars? Mackie credits stylists like Law Roach for bringing his designs back to the red carpet and introducing them to a new generation. “Law came to us for Zendaya,” he says. “In the beginning, I told him she was too young for the more outrageous things. We loaned her a ball gown, and she wore it to the Time 100 Gala in 2022. Then two years later, when she was inducting Cher into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she called and said, ‘Am I old enough now?’ And I said, ‘Of course.’ ” When Cher saw Zendaya’s bugle-beaded bare midriff crisscrossing look onstage, she said, “What’s she doing in my dress?’’
Mackie’s archive still holds hundreds of pieces — some celebrity-worn, others showgirl costumes with roulette wheels that light up, still others runway looks from his brief and inglorious career as a fashion designer showing in New York, where the industry dismissed him as “Barnum Bob” for having too much Hollywood flash.
All have continued to increase in value, with a Cher look from last year’s sale fetching more than $101,600, more than 20 times the estimate. “A lot of people are wanting to create their own archive of vintage fashion. It could be a personality or a celebrity, it could be a stylist, it could even be a production studio wanting to have it,” says Michael Amato, a senior fashion specialist at Julien’s Auctions, adding that the value of Mackie’s costumes has gone up overall because of the high-profile younger stars who have embraced his work. Touring for screenings and Q&As with his 2024 documentary, Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, has also put the designer back in the spotlight — and in stores.
But even as his creations change hands, Mackie’s imagination hasn’t slowed. He’s developing a Las Vegas show about his life, and he’s still promoting the film. The Diva exhibition featuring his work, which first opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2023, opens in Melbourne, Australia, in December and then moves to Denver, its only U.S. stop.
Today, Mackie still sketches — by hand, never on a computer. “That’s how I learned,” he says. Asked if he thinks about retiring, he smiles. “I won’t always be working,” he says. “I’m an old fart. What are you gonna do?” But then he adds, “You want to keep working as long as you can. It’s what I always intended to do. And how often do you get to do what you intended to do?”
He admits to a couple of regrets. “I would like to design more ballets or operas. People don’t come to me for that so much.” But the fans, it turns out, have never stopped coming. “When we went on tour with the documentary, I didn’t realize how many fans I had,” he says. “You don’t think about that — it’s just your job.” Even in Palm Springs, fame finds him. “Sometimes someone stops me in the frozen food aisle, and I hear my name from behind: ‘Is that Bob Mackie?’ ” he says. For fashion’s greatest showman, all the world’s a stage — even the frozen food aisle.
Feature image: Miley Cyrus performs in a vintage Mackie dress at the 68th Grammys in 2024, where she won two awards; singer and Oscar winner Cher poses in a bugle beaded Bob Mackie dress, c. 1978; Zendaya borrowed a hand-beaded halter neck gown from Mackie’s Fall 2001 couture collection to Cher’s induction to the 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame event.
This story originally appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of C Magazine.
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