Bob Mackie, the costume designer whose sequins, feathers and strategically placed nothing defined six decades of American show business glamour, died on Monday at the age of 87. A statement posted to his Instagram account confirmed the news and did not give a cause of death.
“It is with a heavy heart that we share the news that Mr. Bob Mackie passed away today,” the post read. “He lived his 87 years to the fullest, fulfilling his dream of being a Fashion and Costume Designer, which is all he ever wanted to do.” His team added that “his genius and extraordinary designs will live on forever, continuing to bring beauty into this world.”
For a man whose work was impossible to miss, Mackie started out almost invisibly. Born in Los Angeles in 1939, he began sketching other people’s designs at Paramount, working alongside Frank Thompson and the formidable Edith Head. While employed as a sketch artist for the French couturier Jean Louis, Broadway.com reports, he drew the original design for the sheer, nude-illusion gown Marilyn Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” at John F. Kennedy’s birthday celebration in May 1962. It became one of the most famous garments of the twentieth century. The credit went to Jean Louis. Mackie was 23.
From a Vegas revue to eleven seasons of Carol Burnett
The break came in 1966, when Mitzi Gaynor hired him to dress her Las Vegas revue. The bedazzled, showgirl-derived silhouettes he built for that show became the template for everything that followed: big shapes, high shine, and detail engineered to read from the back row of an arena rather than the front row of a fashion show.
A year later he took up residence at The Carol Burnett Show, where he stayed for the program’s entire eleven-season run — a workload that meant conceiving an entire variety-show wardrobe, sketch costumes included, week after week. It is the job that produced the curtain-rod dress from the show’s Gone With the Wind parody, and it is where he met the performer who would define his career.
Cher was a guest during the first season. Mackie later told Broadway.com he had braced for someone difficult. “I thought she would be kind of sullen,” he said. “She wasn’t at all. She was delightful and cute and a little Audrey Hepburn-esque kind of girl.” He went on to dress her on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, on her solo variety series, on tour, on red carpets and at the Met Gala — a collaboration that ran, by PinkNews’ accounting, across a 65-year career.
It was not universally applauded at the time. The 1986 Academy Awards headdress and the black mesh bodysuit from the “If I Could Turn Back Time” video drew genuine outrage on arrival, and both are now shorthand for an entire era of pop spectacle.
Nine Emmys, three Oscar nominations, one Tony
The awards record is lopsided in a revealing way. Mackie won nine Emmy Awards from more than thirty nominations, which is unsurprising given that television was where his work lived. Film was less generous: he was nominated for three Academy Awards — for Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, Barbra Streisand in Funny Lady and Bernadette Peters in Pennies From Heaven — and won none of them.
The Tony came late. In 2019 he won for The Cher Show, a production in which he was required to recreate his own back catalog and in which he also appeared as a character, played by Michael Berresse. Elsewhere on Broadway he designed the 1971 revival of On the Town, Platinum, The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public and Moon Over Buffalo, plus Carol Channing in Lorelei and Carol Burnett in the Sondheim revue Putting It Together.
Beyond Cher, the client list reads as a roll call of performers who understood that a costume is part of the act: Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Dolly Parton, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, Ann-Margret and Whitney Houston. UPI notes that he was widely known as the “Sultan of Sequins.” He also took the aesthetic downmarket on purpose, designing a long-running line of collector Barbie dolls for Mattel and selling mass-market clothing internationally — the rare couture-adjacent name that genuinely wanted to be in everyone’s closet.
What he leaves behind
Accounts of his career length vary slightly between outlets, some describing six decades and others a full 65 years, and no outlet has reported a cause of death. As of Monday evening, Cher herself had not issued a public statement.
His influence is still in active circulation rather than safely archived. Mackie pieces have been worn in recent years by Zendaya and by Taylor Swift, who used archival Mackie in promotional art for The Life of a Showgirl — a reminder that the visual grammar of pop stardom he built in 1967 has not been replaced so much as inherited.
Mackie married the performer LuLu Porter in 1960; the couple had a son, Robert “Robin” Gordon Mackie Jr., and divorced in 1963. Their son died of AIDS-related complications in 1993. Mackie’s long partnership, personal and professional, was with the designer Ray Aghayan, with whom he collaborated repeatedly and who died in 2011. He is survived by a granddaughter and two great-grandchildren.
Tonight’s Primetime Emmy Awards, the ceremony that honored him nine times, takes place hours after his death was announced.
