Bob Mackie, 'Sultan of Sequins,' Dies at 87

Bob Mackie, the costume designer who dressed the biggest names in entertainment for more than six decades, died on Monday at 87. The announcement came through his Instagram account, which noted simply that he had lived his years fully, pursuing the only career he ever wanted: making clothes that stopped people mid-breath.

Mackie earned his nickname—the "Sultan of Sequins"—honestly. A Tony Award, nine Emmy Awards, and three Oscar nominations accumulated across a career that began in 1962 when he was sketching costumes for other designers and ended only recently, with him still creating for contemporary artists. But his reputation rested less on awards than on a single, unmistakable gift: he understood that a costume could be a statement, a provocation, a moment of pure theatrical defiance.

The clearest proof came in 1986, when Cher walked the Academy Awards red carpet in a Mackie creation that became instantly legendary. The outfit featured a towering plumed mohawk headdress and left her midriff bare—a choice so shocking for the time that it altered what American television audiences understood was possible. Cher herself explained the logic years later in a 2024 documentary: she hadn't been nominated for a film everyone expected her to win for, so she dressed that night as an act of revenge. The costume worked. It entered fashion history not as a footnote but as a defining image of the 1980s.

Mackie had been instrumental in pushing Cher toward that boundary-breaking moment. When she first emerged as a performer, he told the BBC in 2010, she "looked like no-one else in the entertainment business." His designs gave her permission to be visibly, unapologetically herself. Cher became widely credited as the first woman to show her navel on American television, and Mackie's work was central to that small, enormous shift.

He dressed Elton John in a bedazzled Dodgers baseball uniform for performances at Dodger Stadium in 1975—a costume so perfectly calibrated to its wearer that it became as iconic as the man himself. Pink wore his designs throughout her Funhouse tour in 2009 and remembered him as "loving, wickedly funny and an absolute genius." As recently as 2024, Miley Cyrus performed at the Grammy Awards in a Mackie creation, winning an award that year for her breakup anthem "Flowers"—perhaps, as one observer noted, her own version of a revenge dress.

Mackie was born Robert Gordon Mackie in Monterey Park, California, in 1939. His entry into costume design came through Jean Louis, a French-American designer for whom he worked as a sketch artist. One of his earliest assignments was sketching the dress Marilyn Monroe wore in 1962 when she sang "Happy Birthday Mr President" to John F. Kennedy—a moment that itself became costume history.

He married actress and singer Lulu Porter in 1960; they divorced three years later and had a son, Robin, who died in his early thirties from an AIDS-related illness. From 1963 until 2011, Mackie was in a long-term relationship with Iranian fashion designer Ray Aghayan. In 2018, when asked if he planned to retire, Mackie's answer was definitive: "I hope not." He kept working until the end, designing for artists who understood that what he made was never merely clothing—it was transformation.