Goodbye to Bob Mackie, the man who dressed Marilyn Monroe the day she sang for Kennedy

BarcelonaBefore him, stars only dressed well. After him, stars dressed like stars. Bob Mackie, who died this week at 87 due to pneumonia, has left us an intangible legacy: having redefined de facto how a show business star should dress. With the designs he began creating from a very young age, he made the entire industry understand that a star's attire must serve to be iconic, luminous, and exceptional. That is to say, to be diametrically different from the rest and not to be an improved version of the rest. Seeing how he did it, there could be no better mind than his to give shape and color to this creative concept. We refer to the evidence. More than six decades of evidence, to be more exact.

The young Mackie, unfortunately little known to so many fashion pseudo-experts who in reality only have an obsession with luxury brands, showed promise from the beginning. At barely twenty years old, he drew one of the most iconic dresses in history: the one Marilyn wore to sing the Happy Birthday, Mr. President extremely sensually to John F. Kennedy. It was signed by his boss, the designer Jean Louis—Marlene Dietrich's go-to dressmaker—who had hired him as an intern. The first sketch, however, is Mackie's.

Precocious

That design was absolutely ahead of its time and fit perfectly with the woman who was to wear it and with the event in which it was to be worn. Instinctively, Mackie was clear on what to do in such cases before there was any kind of precedent regarding these matters. We are talking about the year 1962, a time when being dressed in flesh-colored silk chiffon –aka naked, especially if viewed through that low-definition television...– highlighting the body's shapes and covered in rhinestones was an absolute revolution. Mackie and his boss made a tandem that has gone down in history.

That early success did not make him rest on his laurels. Mackie, who had also worked for Edith Head –the most awarded costume designer in Hollywood and the reason why many of Hitchcock's films are so glamorous–, worked his fingers to the bone in the mid-sixties by signing off on the looks of the entire team of comedian Carol Burnett on her highly-followed The Carol Burnett Show for 11 seasons An enormous display of work capacity and creativity. Burnett had been captivated when she saw in 1966 the image change he created for the singer Mitzi Gaynor, who had trusted the designer to renew her image before starting a residency in Las Vegas. For Burnett, he signed hundreds of designs but one of the most iconic and celebrated is the one that parodied the image of Scarlett O'Hara, with a curtain rod incorporated. The inherent humor of Burnett's television show and Mackie's creative audacity bequeathed us a dress that is currently on display at the Smithsonian, in Washington.

Inseparable

But Mackie's great breakthrough came at the hands of Cher. It was an astral conjunction to bring her body together with his creations. They were each other's better half. When you see what they did together, you understand that her persona was an orphan before Mackie and his dresses were too before Cher. The singer was the right figure for his daring designs, she was the ideal character for his creative exaggeration, and her social position was important enough to turn it all into material for the history of show-business.

The professional marriage between both artists, furthermore, arrived at a key moment for Cher. He accompanied her in her transition from a hippie woman of the sixties married to Sonny Bono to an empowered woman and divorcee of that opportunist, aware of her potential as a solo artist and willing to shout it to the world. No look better than a Mackie to empower someone. It was with this joint venture that the designer popularly became the sultan of sequins and the guru of glitter, nicknames that accompanied him until the end. Unlike many other creatives, who have to adapt a lot to trends to survive and often lose their identity, Mackie was always very identifiable. Throughout the more than six decades he was active, his signature was unmistakable. How many would want that!

A long idyll

Perhaps Mackie was the man with whom Cher had her longest relationship. Although they met when she was still doing the television show with Bono, that was an anecdote compared to everything that would come. The glamorous and exuberant style of the creator, filled with sequins, rhinestones, crystals, and metallic fabrics, combined with plunging necklines, transparencies, cutouts, and form-fitting shapes, sealed with feathers, capes, and large volumes, and always endowed with a lot of movement, accompanied Cher, even to the Oscars on many occasions. In fact, the dress in which she accepted the Oscar in 1988 for her role in Moonstruck is by Mackie. In fact, that is one of the most remembered for the areas it left visible and for its imposing black feather headdress.

The reality is that they egged each other on. They had an exponential effect on one another. She explained that whenever she went to his studio, she would end up telling him "I'm your fucking Barbie" because he would dress her however he wanted. And he acknowledged this reality whenever he was interviewed. "When I met Cher, I thought she was the most beautiful thing in the world, and then I looked at her figure and I thought she was like a model. [...] The producers didn't know what to do with her and I said: 'She can be anything!'. Her body was perfect and she could wear whatever she wanted, so we started making crazy things for her," he confirmed, having even ended up dressing the Barbies that were made of Cher.

Loved by the industry

Evidently, that showcase was a springboard for the creator, who continued to fuse haute couture techniques with his particular exuberant taste on the bodies of the most acclaimed artists of a generation. Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Liza Minnelli, and Barbra Streisand trusted him. Inevitably, so did Dolly Parton or Elton John, who obviously could not resist the urge to live the full experience of Mackie. In fact, with John they also hit it off so well that the singer of Your song ended up performing that and other songs in a costume inspired by Donald Duck in 1980 at a charity concert in Central Park. While singing it, he let out a few "quack-quack" sounds.

The creator's impact was so great on the industry that it spanned decades one after another until reaching the present day. Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and Sabrina Carpenter are some of the youngest artists who have chosen Mackie. And he has been alive to see it! A true tribute in life for a man who walked so that they could run (in heels and covered in glitter).