Bob Mackie, the nine-time Emmy-winning costume designer known as the “Sultan of Sequins,” died Monday at the age of 87.

“It is with a heavy heart that we share the news that Mr. Bob Mackie passed away today,” a post on his Instagram page 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 genius and extraordinary designs will live on forever, continuing to bring beauty into this world.”

It was only January of last year that Mackie attended Toronto’s Hot Doc premiere of Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, an intimate look at the life and six-decade career of the legendary costume and fashion designer. The evening also included a question and answer session in which Mackie dished on his famous clients – from Cher to Barbra Streisand to Diana Ross and Carol Burnett – with his sharp and unfailing wit. For the visionary, those he fitted with his meticulously designed costumes and dresses were far more than muses. “My philosophy is watch what they do, how they work on stage, how they walk, how they sit. It is very important,” he told CBS News in 2025. “You can’t just put a dress on anybody.” 

As tributes continue to pour in for the fashion giant, we revisit a reflection on his outsized impact – from the screen to the red carpet. —Andrew Wright

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– FROM THE ARCHIVES –

Bob Mackie: The Sultan of Sequins

Provocative, nearly naked gowns worn by celebrities like Rihanna, Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian have become routine on the red carpet. The boundary-pushing style is also an on-stage staple for entertainers from Jennifer Lopez to Demi Lovato. For every towering headdress and barely there frock, you can thank Bob Mackie.

Mackie famously designed the sublimely over-the-top, sheer, beaded and feathered outfit Cher wore to the 1974 Met Gala (and on the 1975 cover of Time), as well as her outré 1986 and 1988 Academy Award outfits. These style moments are an indelible part of her legacy, but they were hardly the first of such ensembles, as we learn in Laura Ross and Frank Vlastnik’s The Art of Bob Mackie. The coffee table tome is the first-ever comprehensive and authorized showcase of Mackie’s life and work, which was beamed into millions of living rooms on the small screen and helped shape (and sometimes shock) contemporary taste and elevate the definition of glamour.

The Art of Bob Mackie lavishly chronicles creative partnerships with luminaries like Diana Ross and Mitzi Gaynor, two decades of Emmy-winning variety specials, and Oscar nominations for Pennies from Heaven, Funny Lady and Lady Sings the Blues. Not only are there never-before-seen sketches and personal photographs (including his first showgirl costume, made at college), but it’s bookended with appreciations from two of his most famous long-time collaborators: Carol Burnett and Cher.

Mackie, 82, began his career as a sketch artist for film, drawing for legendary costume designers Edith Head and Jean Louis; for the latter, he sketched the rendering of the notorious rhinestone-covered “naked” dress Marilyn Monroe wore in 1962 to serenade President Kennedy on his birthday. It would prove prescient: Mackie debuted his own version in 1969. In the opening number of her second network special, curvaceous South Pacific star Mitzi Gaynor wears the clinging, nude illusion gown (made from a flesh-toned, knit fabric called soufflé) that launched thousands of imitations.

Bored with the slow pace of movie production, Mackie had switched to television a few years earlier when fashion and costume designer Ray Aghayan hired him as an assistant on The Judy Garland Show. Together, in 1967, they won the first Emmy ever awarded for costume design, for the television musical  Alice Through the Looking Glass; their professional and long-time life partnership would last nearly 50 years until Aghayan’s death in 2011.

In her 2010 memoir This Time Together, Burnett devotes an entire chapter to Mackie, who designed as many as 50 costumes a week for her eponymous variety show from 1967 to 1978 (at one point, he did the same for Sonny and Cher across the hall). In the foreword to this new book, the comedian reiterates that hiring Mackie was “one of the smartest things I ever did.” His brilliant work for Gaynor is what first caught her eye. “I marvelled at the costumes,” she writes. “Not only were they beautiful, but when it was required, they were funny!” Burnett also credits his witty costumes for influencing how she’d play characters in some sketches.

With apologies to the old adage, “sequins are easy; comedy is hard,” Mackie was able to shift seamlessly between the two. His range includes knockout original high fashion, like the glimmering, salmon-pink halter gowns The Supremes wore in their 1969 GIT: On Broadway special (the ones that erupt in a surprise of feathers at the hem), as well as outlandish but cleverly conceptual get-ups for comedy sketches.

Use the words “Bob Mackie” and “That Dress” in a sentence and they might just as easily refer to his razzle-dazzle for Cher as to the sketch widely acknowledged as one of the funniest moments in the history of television: Burnett’s Starlet O’Hara dress in the 1976 send-up “Went with the Wind.” Mackie fashioned the antebellum parody gown – now in the Smithsonian – from green velvet draperies, leaving the tassel sashes and curtain rod hilariously intact. The appreciation of his genius transcends generations: An upcoming Mackie documentary, for example, features 90-year-old Gaynor alongside super stylist Law Roach of Céline Dion fame, who once dressed Tiffany Haddish for the MTV Awards in a tribute to Mackie’s Gone with the Wind spoof.

Mackie was raised in suburban Los Angeles by his grandparents. “Radio was my biggest influence,” he recalls in the book. “I could visualize the mysteries I listened to, but I also loved movies, especially musicals and adventures. Showgirls, pirates … I wanted so badly to live in a Technicolor world.” And he has. His glitz has graced Broadway, Las Vegas and opera stages, and the wardrobes of stars like Diahann Carroll, Whitney Houston, Bernadette Peters, Juliet Prowse, Carol Channing, Lucille Ball — and even Elton John, whose “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” stage outfit was recreated for the Rocketman biopic. As U.S. actor and Drag Race impresario RuPaul once said: “Anyone who has ever done glamour has had to pay homage to Bob Mackie.”