The Art of Bob Mackie

Cher, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli & Lucille Ball

 

Bob Mackie has had an extraordinary career spanning 60 years, designing costumes for some of the world’s most famous entertainers – Cher, Judy Garland, Lucille Ball, Liza Minnelli, Carol Burnett, Bernadette Peters, Whitney Houston and Diana Ross are just a few of the icons who have donned his glittering sequined creations.

 

Mackie became a household name decades before designers were known outside of fashion-industry circles. Some of his pieces are among the world’s most famous garments; most notably, perhaps, the dress that Marilyn Monroe wore in 1962 when she crooned “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to then-president John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden. Mackie was just 23, working as an assistant to the French designer Jean Louis, when he sketched the Monroe gown.

 

Marilyn’s “Simple” Happy Birthday JFK Dress

 

“It was”, he tells Park, “A basic, simple spaghetti-strap dress, except you could see right through it and it had diamonds sewn all over it. But of course, she looked amazing in it,” Mackie says. “And can you imagine that girl in the center of Madison Square Garden with all those spotlights on her and she takes off her little fur jacket and it looks like she’s just up there naked, but wet from all the diamonds? That was pretty fun.”

 

Yes, this is the very dress that Kim Kardashian wore in May to the 2022 Met Gala and the delightfully frank designer bluntly denounced the fashion faux pas as a “big mistake.” “Marilyn was a goddess… She was just fabulous. Nobody photographs like that. And it was done for her. It was designed for her. Nobody else should be seen in that dress,” Mackie told EW after the event.

 

Cher’s “Naked” Met Gala Dress

 

Another Mackie Met Gala gown, Cher’s 1974 “Naked Dress,” became mega-famous, ending up on the cover of Time magazine. “It created such a hullabaloo,” says Mackie. “A lot of newsstands took it off the racks because people were shocked. It was just so silly.” The see-through dress trend died down for a while, until more recently. “In the last ten years or so, all of a sudden, all these young actresses and wannabes had been looking at the internet and copying a lot of these clothes, just verbatim. I mean, line for line, it’s kind of crazy.”

 

Admiration for Mackie’s creations must run in the family, because in 2021 it was Kardashian’s half-sister, Kendall Jenner, who wore a sheer dress almost identical to Cher’s to the Met Gala. “It just makes you want to say, ‘Go do something different. Do something that’ll open our eyes and surprise us,’” says Mackie. Cher, with whom he has collaborated for many years, had a similar reaction to Jenner’s homage, but he adds, “She liked it in a way too, that this many years later people were still talking about the dress.”

 

“And we’re talking about a lot of years,” Mackie says. “I met Cher when she was 19 and she’s in her 70s now. That’s a long time ago, and she looks amazing still. She can still wear that kind of stuff.”

 

Cher: “I don’t want to look like a housewife in an evening gown.”

 

Indeed, 14 years later, in 1988, Cher again created a sensation in a daring, baring, Mackie creation when accepting her Best Actress Oscar for Moonstruck. “But”, Mackie explains, “This is Cher. She said, ‘I don’t want to look like a housewife in an evening gown’ when she goes to one of those things. So, she dresses up. She loves Halloween and she loves to dress up.”

 

While red-carpet dressing is sometimes a part of his job, Mackie notes, it is not his modus operandi. “That isn’t really costume design, it’s getting something to be photographed in and be in the paper the next day. That’s not what I do really, in life.”

 

Book: The Art of Bob Mackie

 

All these escapades and much, much more from Mackie’s unprecedented career have been chronicled in a new book, The Art of Bob Mackie, by pop culture historian Frank Vlastnik and author/editor Laura Ross. The book, from Simon & Schuster, is the first comprehensive compendium showcasing Mackie’s work from early sketches when working for Edith Head at Paramount Studios to today, as he remains as busy as ever in his 80s.

 

Along with gorgeous photos, the tome features dishy anecdotes from Mackie and many of his diva muses, plus an afterword by Cher and an intro by Carol Burnett, for whose TV variety show Mackie designed the costumes during its entire 11-year run. That gig involved designing costumes for Burnett’s many comedy skits during each episode, and also costumes for the cast and every guest who appeared on the show.

 

He has found the book to be oddly nostalgic. “It’s amazing, people will say, ‘I’d forgotten all about that,’ and I love reading it because it makes me laugh at those jokes again, because I did a lot of comedy work with Carol Burnett and different people. That was fun to do, and usually you don’t get offers to do that kind of work, and I loved it,” Mackie says. “And then movies, and TV specials in Vegas, and an opera ballet, whatever. You just love doing the work. I’m not happy when I’m not doing something like that.”

 

And Mackie has no intention of stopping. “When you do what you really want to do in life, and really love doing it, you don’t think about that. You just think, ‘Where’s my next job coming from?’ You get kind of itchy and you really want to do the work.” bobmackie.com

 

Pull quotes for Bob Mackie:

1. About Kim K – “Nobody else should be seen in Marilyn’s dress.”
2. Kendall Jenner in Cher’s dress – “Just makes you want to say, ‘Go do something different.’”

3. “I don’t want to look like a housewife in an evening gown,” said Cher