Bob Mackie, the costume designer whose sequins, feathers and gloriously bare gowns defined American showbiz glamour, has died in Palm Springs, California, at 87. His publicist said the cause was pneumonia. Over a six-decade career he collected nine Emmy Awards, a Tony and three Oscar nominations, and earned nicknames like the Sultan of Sequins and the Rajah of Rhinestones.
Mackie's most famous canvases were the women of American entertainment. He sketched the sheer, beaded gown Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang 'Happy Birthday' to President Kennedy in 1962. He spent years on 'The Carol Burnett Show', dreaming up comic characters including Starlet O'Hara, whose curtain-rod dress now sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. And with Cher he created red carpet history: the sheer feathered number she wore to the 1974 Met Gala landed them both on the cover of Time, followed by the 1986 beaded spiderweb gown and the barely-there dress she wore to collect her best actress Oscar in 1988. Madonna, Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand, Pink and Kristin Chenoweth all passed through his studio.
His influence hasn't faded with him. Zendaya wore an archive Mackie gown to Cher's 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, Anya Taylor-Joy and Miley Cyrus pull from his back catalogue, and Taylor Swift's showgirl look on the 2025 album 'The Life of a Showgirl' drew on Mackie originals. The 2024 documentary 'Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion' traced the career, and a 1975 Cher dress sold at auction that year for $101,600 — roughly 25 times its estimate. He even designed dozens of Barbies for Mattel, including a fanged 'Lady Dracula Cher' whose box doubled as a coffin.
Born in Southern California and hooked early on Technicolor musicals, Mackie studied at Pasadena City College and LA's Chouinard Art Institute before working under costume legend Edith Head. Beyond television, he dressed Broadway casts from 'On the Town' in 1971 to 'The Cher Show', which won him the Tony, and ran a ready-to-wear line that reached New York Fashion Week in the 1980s and '90s.
Why does this matter to travellers? Mackie's career is a map of American pop-culture landmarks you can actually visit: the Smithsonian's Starlet O'Hara dress in Washington DC, his Palm Springs home turf, the Hollywood and Broadway stages he costumed. Fans of the 'naked dress' era — a trend he arguably invented and later found tiresome, grumbling that if you've seen one Kardashian you've seen them all — can trace its whole lineage back to one sketchbook. For anyone planning a Hollywood-glamour themed trip, this is the man who wrote the visual rulebook.