Dear Shaded Viewers,
When I heard the news the death of Bob Mackie, I immediately thought of writing a tribute to him. I have always had a huge admiration for his work. So, you may ask what is there to say about Bob Mackie? He dressed stars and he did glamour perfectly; he dressed a lot of women on television, and he did some rather bizarre things for Cher.
He was so much more than that. Firstly, let’s look at the Carol Burnett Show where he did everything from opera singers as little girls to spoofing every great Hollywood actress from Theda Bara and Gloria Swanson, especially perhaps in Sunset Boulevard, but he also nailed each and every look from Joan Crawford shoulders to the beaded vamp dresses of the Art Deco. He built character into every line and colour choice; indeed, many others have said putting on his costume immediately gave them the gift to become the person in the script. He designed literally thousands of costumes for the show, dancers, guests, comedians, singers, film spoofs, and mini dramas. He also spectacularly dressed Cher in her television series, and Mitzi Gaynor in hers, as well as many others. The nude beaded dress he created for Mitzi to wear in 1969 is as amazing today as it was then.
He had learnt form the best, Jean Louis and Ray Aghayan, who he’d started out with, but he had also the great skills of being a wonderful illustrator, he could really draw and show a costume on a piece of paper, and also a superb sense of proportion, so any leading lady whatever her height or size looked at her absolute best. These gifts added to his creative talent gave him a solid foundation as a designer, not simply a creator of frivolities but someone who forged a career balancing fashion and theatre. A gown for the star to talk to the audience, or sing a ballad, or costumes for a tribute to a special classic movie, he could do it all. His understanding of how to dress the dancer in Mitzi or the model in Cher or the diva in Marilyn Horne was just a glimpse of his talent. He could switch from severe and tailored to corseted and curved and from pastel ruffles to languid black drape.
The collections he designed for ready to wear were another example of his skills, offering Bob Mackie to a broader audience. Just as his work with Barbie dolls offered another way to buy into his work.
The fact that there are several books about his work demonstrates and proves the depth of his oeuvre, and of course he was also wonderfully articulate and witty in interviews.
His legacy is huge and in spite of us remembering perhaps some of the most outrageous creations, he was a complete designer with a full range of gifts enabling him to design a brilliant sweater and pants or a neat cocktail dress. I’ve been a fan all my life and have all the books, and there are wonderful reminiscences on YouTube. His drawings fetch vast amounts and now many of his pieces are in collections, museums, and archives. The Gone with the Wind parody dress of course is in the Smithsonian, and we can view many episodes of old TV shows in numerous ways.
His career was amazing because he could do the job better than anyone else, and he wanted the best. He loved to make women look fabulous; he embraced glamour and style as his signature. However, he was brilliant in that he plundered Hollywood costume, vintage couture and anything else that served his creative purpose, and then put it all through the Bob Mackie filter, so it became his, not a parody or a cheap copy, but something wonderful in its own right. He had a unique eye, a superb way of conjuring up a strong visual through his designs, a way of making us look at the wearer as well as the costume, somehow, he never swamped the women he dressed, however exaggerated the look, they emerged triumphant.
Times have changed and a career like his is impossible today, he was a legend as much as his work. There will be many an erudite and detailed summing up of his work, and serious obituaries, but I wanted to pay tribute to a man, who in his own way contributed so much to the betterment of life with his work. Someone whose witty and glamorous designs, even some of the bizarre ones, lead us to announce, “That’s very Bob Mackie.”
