09/14/2026
❤️❤️❤️ Bob Mackie and Cher, the (creative) love story that draped a legend. ❤️❤️❤️
For nearly sixty years, Bob Mackie and Cher have made fashion a form of complicity, entertainment a laboratory, and the body a fearless territory. They met in 1967, when she was still the raven-haired girl singing with Sonny Bono and he was a young television costume designer. Since then, amidst sequins, feathers, transparencies, and impossible dresses, they have built something that resembles much more a legend than a career.
When the two met for the first time, it was a chance, fleeting, unusual encounter: it was 1967, when Sonny and Cher were invited as guests on The Carol Burnett Show, a program for which Mackie was already working as a costume designer. She, who already knew she would be legendary, and he, a busy newcomer, his first reaction upon seeing the duo was a small creative panic: what could he do with those young hippies who appeared on television in fur vests, suede pants, and that "New Age caveman" look he would recall years later? Then everything changed: "She could be anything," he would say when they shook hands, she could be anything. She, however, thought, "love at first sight." What united them wasn't just a taste for spectacular outfits, but a kind of private language: "Sometimes we don't even have to talk, we already know," Cher said. Looking at them in photographs from the 1970s, in fact, there seems to exist between them a form of professional telepathy, the complicity of two people who have learned to immediately recognize in the other the possibility of an even more audacious gesture.
Mackie wasn't interested in fashion in the orthodox sense of the word: he was interested in costume, theater, transformation, that moment when a garment stops being an object and becomes a character. He had learned by working in Hollywood, first as an illustrator and then alongside big names in film costume design, and television would offer him the ideal terrain to exercise that unbridled imagination. When he arrived on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, his relationship with Cher became something more than a simple relationship between costume designer and performer: together they began to construct an image. Seventies television was the perfect place for this invention, because every week it demanded a different character, another silhouette, another fantasy. Cher could have up to twenty costume changes in an hour, and Mackie still remembers transforming her, time after time, into historical figures, stage characters, imaginary women, goddesses, femme fatales, camp creatures, impossible visions. He himself explained that those dresses were tools to portray characters: they could be Queen Elizabeth I, the serpent from the Garden of Eden, or Olive Oyl. There were almost no limits, because the point wasn't the dress, but what the dress allowed Cher to become.
And then there were the sequins, of course. Sequins everywhere, crystals, fringe, feathers, chainmail, sheer fabrics, impossible necklines, headpieces that looked like architecture, surfaces that captured every frame and transformed it into light. It's impossible not to mention the naked dress from the 1974 Met Gala. That evening, Cher arrived at the Metropolitan Museum with Mackie on her arm, wrapped in a seemingly impalpable dress, covered in beads and crystals and finished with feathers that seemed to float around her body. The fabric revealed almost everything: the skin had been transformed into an integral part of the design. It was the illusion of being naked without actually being so, the technique serving a fantasy that would take decades to be assimilated by mainstream culture.
The dress caused a scandal; a year later, wearing the same dress, Cher posed for the cover of Time magazine. It was one of those moments when the costume ceases to be costume and becomes news: according to the designer, the issue was withdrawn or banned in some American cities, while in others it sold out with astonishing speed. The cover, photographed by Richard Avedon, placed the dress in a national spotlight and demonstrated that Mackie's work no longer existed solely in the protected space of entertainment: it had entered the public discourse. In the years that followed, Cher and Mackie continued to play with that same idea of excess: the 1970s were littered with sequined two-pieces, midriff-baring tops, sheer bodices, feathers, fringes, and costumes that seemed to belong simultaneously to cabaret, science fiction, disco, and a Hollywood vaudeville theater. Looks remembered in archives and retrospectives include the celebrated 1978 Dancing Flames, leather and feather silhouettes, sheer bodysuits, and a near-endless array of glittering gowns.
But it was precisely in the 1980s that their alliance became almost a form of subversion. In 1986, Cher arrived at the Oscars in one of the most famous, imitated, and misunderstood looks in red carpet history: tight black pants, a top covered in metallic details, and, above all, a gigantic black feather headdress that gave the singer's head an almost mohawk-like, theatrical, monumental silhouette. Cher hadn't been considered a serious enough actress to receive a nomination for Mask, and instead of showing up at the ceremony in the traditional manner to demonstrate her respectability, she decided to do the opposite: amplify everything the establishment seemed to consider frivolous, and do it so loudly that it was impossible to ignore. Years later, she would say that the look was her way of saying, "This is who I am, and you'll just have to get used to it." Mackie, on the other hand, knew exactly what he was doing. His talent lay not in dressing a woman according to the expectations of the context, but in understanding how that context could be subverted through clothing. The red carpet, before the term became a cultural category in itself, was already a stage for him. And Cher was the ideal actress because she wasn't afraid of the effect she would produce (after all, he, with his ironic wit, called the privilege of dressing her "a job from heaven."
In 1989, If I Could Turn Back Time arrived, and the body once again became a place of scandalous freedom. The look of the video, shot on the USS Missouri, became one of the most recognizable images of Cher's career: a black, transparent, daring costume that left the body exposed and transformed it into a sort of erotic armor. The image was so explicit by the television standards of the time that the video encountered strong resistance in programming. Their collaboration is not just a nostalgia trip from the 1970s and 1980s. Bob Mackie continued to design for Cher, even in 2017 when Cher appeared on stage at the Billboard Music Awards in two of his creations: one encrusted with crystals and a second, black and transparent, wearing a motorcycle jacket. Here too, the provocation was meticulously planned: what looked like a cover-up was actually a crystal shape positioned in exactly the right place. This is perhaps the designer's great lesson: nudity, in his clothes, has never been simply nudity, but illusion, construction, theatre.
A quick roundup of other memorable moments: in 2003, for the Living Proof: The Farewell Tour, Mackie reinterpreted four decades of Cher's career through costumes (including the famous red ensemble with sparkling fringes and a hood). In 2018, for The Cher Show on Broadway, he designed over 600 costumes, reconstructing the singer's various identities through silhouettes: from her hippie beginnings to television, to diva and pop icon. In 2024, some of their costumes were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, making that collaboration officially part of music and fashion history. It's difficult, after all, to separate Cher from Bob Mackie, and Bob Mackie from Cher. He had found a performer unafraid to overdo things; she, a designer capable of seeing possibilities no one else had yet imagined. As RuPaul observed, Cher probably wouldn't have been Cher without her costumes. Bob Mackie gave her feathers, transparencies, crystals, and armor; Cher gave him her extremism, her character. Nearly sixty years after their first meeting, those dresses continue to be among the most cited in the fashion world. After all, Bob Mackie spent a lifetime designing her, Cher spent a lifetime becoming what he saw.
