Bob Mackie is looking back on the stir Cher caused with the “naked illusion dress” she wore to the 1974 Met Gala.
In an interview about the new documentary, Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, the iconic designer, 85, told PEOPLE that Cher picked the controversial gown herself.
“I said to her, ‘What do you want to wear to that, to the Metropolitan, when we go there?’ ” Mackie recalled. “She wanted me to go with her and I said, ‘I’ll go with you. But what do you want to wear? You have to wear something that we’ve done.’ And she pauses and says, ‘I want to wear the dress with the feathers.’ ”
As Mackie noted in a recent conversation with Interview, he first made waves with a version of the revealing look worn by actress Mitzi Gaynor in a 1969 NBC variety special. Five years later, Cher rocked the fashion world when she wore the sheer, feather fringed dress to the Met Gala — long before the annual even became a showcase for celebrities in over-the-top ensembles.
“The place went crazy,” Mackie told Interview. “I’ve never seen so many photographers just come out of the shadows at the Met and take her picture. And of course she was in every newspaper the next day, and they’ve been printing it in the last 50 years, over and over again.”
“But it was just amazing,” he added. “People were horrified, they thought, that’s not fashion, she’s just naked at the Metropolitan.”
The naysayers were apparently wrong, however. As Mackie noted, Cher later appeared in the December 1974 issue of Vogue shot by legendary photographer Richard Avedon wearing the same “naked dress,” and an outtake from the shoot was used for the cover of the March 17, 1975, issue of Time.
“I was so surprised it was even there,” Mackie told Interview of the Time cover. “She was supposed to wear something entirely different. And whoever the publisher was, looked at that other picture of Richard Avedon’s and went, ‘Let’s put this on the cover, we’ll sell more of these.’ ”
“How often do you get a girl that looks like that, dressed like that, on the cover of Time magazine?” Mackie said. “Usually it was some funny old Russian man who everybody hated, so it was just the weirdest thing. They were pulling them off the newsstands in the South and tearing off the front cover, it was just shocking.”
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Mackie and Cher continued to collaborate throughout the ’70s and ’80s. In 1986, they made headlines for another shocking look: a midriff-baring, impossibly low-slung two-piece gown topped with an outlandish feathered headdress that the “If I Could Turn Back Time” singer wore to the Academy Awards.
As Mackie explains in the documentary, the look was a return to Cher’s campy, glamorous roots after appearing as more down-to-earth characters in acclaimed films like Silkwood and Mask.
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