Before fashion designer Bob Mackie first met Cher in the mid 1960s, he now admits, “I thought, this girl is not my style. All the pictures of her were like frowning and pouting with Sonny [Bono].”
But the two would go on to form a creative partnership now in its seventh decade — with Mackie, 84, having helped the singer become a style icon.
Although he hasn’t always approved of how she’s worn his designs, like the infamously skimpy bodysuit Cher donned in her 1989 “If I Could Turn Back Time” video, which led Mackie to say: “Please don’t tell anyone I had anything to do with this.”
He also bedazzled the likes of Elton John, Carol Burnett and even Marilyn Monroe in one of her most famous gowns.
Here, Mackie — who was the subject of the 2024 documentary “Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion,” streaming on Prime Video — talks to Page Six about his most famous clients.
Cher
Mackie may have not though much of Cher’s style before they met, but he was immediately charmed by the singer who he met when she was a guest on “The Carol Burnett Show.”
“She was adorable” — though, he added, “She looked like Audrey Hepburn’s younger sister at that point. Her hair in little pigtails, a little yellow sundress.”
But once she got into costume, Mackie said, he saw potential. “I thought, I could do anything on her — she’ll look amazing. She could be anything she wanted to be.”
Interestingly, the Tony winner is not on board with one of Cher’s most iconic looks — the revealing bodysuit piece and leather jacket look that she wore in the “If I Could Turn Back Time” video.
The clip, shot onboard the USS Missouri in front of its cheering crew, caused controversy when Cher turned her back to the camera — revealing her tattooed bottom.
“Playing the bass guitar is her 12-year-old son [Elijah Blue] — there with her whole being out and everything else!” Mackie recalled. “I told her, ‘Please don’t tell anyone I had anything to do with this because I don’t really approve. This is not family viewing.’”
Marilyn Monroe
It doesn’t get much more notorious than the evening gown worn by Marilyn Monroe to sing “Happy Birthday” to John F. Kennedy in 1962. The va-va-voom dress, which was sketched by Mackie and designed by Jean Louis, was festooned with more than 2,500 rhinestones — and Mackie notes, that when the lights hit the dress it looked like the the movie star was “naked, which is a pretty good look for some people.
“And it worked, it worked for Marilyn. Some people try to do it and they come out and you go, ‘Honey, don’t wear that.’”
The gown, which was worn by Kim Kardashian at the 2022 Met Gala sold at auction for a record $4.8 million.
Elton John
When the “Crocodile Rock” singer asked Mackie to whip up some costumes for him, Mackie “was not sure what I could do exactly, but … I told him, ‘You’re like a Dickens character, with your glasses and your little hats.’ I did a bunch of sketches before he went back to London and he was into them all. I had to get them done in a couple of days. And every time he came to LA, he wanted something new.
Inspiration struck in the form of Walt Disney.
“I did the Donald Duck costume and I also did a Minnie Mouse costume for him,” Mackie recalled. “He said, ‘Could I be Minnie Mouse?’ and I said, ‘Well, I think you could. What’s going to stop you? You know, he would just do anything and everything. A little drag didn’t bother him at all.”
John ended up wearing the Donald Duck costume at his big Central Park concert in September 1980.
Carol Burnett
Mackie designed thousands of costumes for “The Carol Burnett Show,” but there is one that really stands out: the famous “curtain rod” dress for a “Gone with the Wind” spoof, “Went With the Wind!”
“It will be on my tombstone because people kept talking about it — and they still do,” Mackie said. “It was on of the hardest ones I ever did because everybody has seen ‘Gone with the Wind’ and the gag in the movie is funny.” (In the film, a newly impoverished Scarlett O’Hara makes a dress out of drapes in an attempt to impress Rhett Butler with finery.)
“Literally the night before we taped, I called drapery [department] at CBS and said, ‘Send me some of those green velvet drapes and plenty of … whatever tassels, send it over,’ and I made it that night,” Mackie recalled. “Carol came over the next morning and she saw it and she laughed and laughed. She really got me when I would do something funny for her. She really understood it, which was heaven for me.”
Tina Turner
“She was just amazing and funny and if she hated something she told you immediately,” Mackie recalled of the legendary singer, who passed away in 2023. “I miss her terribly, but when I see these clips of her I go, ‘Yeah, look at that!’”
Mackie, who dressed Turner in a string of shiny little dresses, remembers how the “What’s Love Got to Do With It” singer was willing to sacrifice comfort for looking good.
“She used to do just crazy stuff, like her shoes always hurt. She wore Louboutins with the high, high heel …And she would take a couple of Tylenol just before she went on stage and push her feet into these shoes and never take them off for the rest of the act, because she wanted to have that high heel look.”
Judy Garland
Mackie worked as an assistant costumer on the singer’s variety show, which ran for only one season (1963-1964), he and remembers watching the show at Garland’s house on Sunday nights.
“It was kind of sad because she was lonesome. Judy would come out wearing her one little black cocktail dress and a pair of little earrings with pearls and she would make shepherd’s pie because she liked it. It was comforting,” the designer said.
“We would have dinner and then we would watch ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ which was on before her show. And if she didn’t like the way someone performed ,she didn’t mind telling you! But then when she was on and it was really good, and she had a good guest star with her singing, it was magic. Barbra Streisand was on, the two of them singing together, Where do you see that in real life? I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
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