Before Bob Mackie dressed Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Cher, Dolly Parton and some of the most famous women in entertainment, Black women were already d-r
Before Bob Mackie dressed Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Cher, Dolly Parton and some of the most famous women in entertainment, Black women were already d-r-e-s-s-e-d.
Look at photographs of Black Americans from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. Look at the women headed to church, the couples going dancing, the musicians, the club women, the working women who saved their good clothes for Sunday. Look at Billie Holiday herself. The hats tilted just so. Gloves. Required. Coats with shape. Hair arranged with intention. Jewelry chosen carefully. A beautiful dress did not have to cost a fortune for somebody to know how to wear it.
Black people were not waiting for Hollywood to teach us glamour.
That is one reason the beauty of Lady Sings the Blues deserves more attention.
When the film arrived in 1972, Diana Ross was stepping into the life of Billie Holiday, one of the great Black artists of the twentieth century. The movie had pain to portray, plenty of it. Yet visually, it did not approach Black life as though suffering had erased style, beauty, desire or elegance.
It allowed Black people to look beautiful. And that was historically respectful in its own way.
The on his way to becoming iconic, Bob Mackie, was part of the costume-design team with Ray Aghayan and Norma Koch, and all three received an Academy Award nomination for their work. One of the surviving ensembles worn by Ross as Holiday, a teal dress with a light-green vest and hat, now belongs to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum identifies all three designers.
What he brought to Lady Sings the Blues, and what would become unmistakable throughout his career, was an understanding that beauty could tell part of the story.
Diana Ross could be vulnerable and beautiful. Billie Holiday’s life could contain terrible suffering without the film visually reducing a Black woman to suffering. Black audiences could recognize the care people of earlier generations actually took with clothing and presentation.
There was no need to manufacture pity by making everybody drab. There was dignity in getting the clothes right. And then there was Bob Mackie unleashed.
Lord, that man could dress a woman.
He Seemed to Understand That Beauty Was Not the Enemy
There is something I have been thinking about while looking back at Mackie’s work. At times today, beauty can feel almost intentionally stifled, as though allowing a woman to be gorgeous might somehow undermine the seriousness of the character.
Mackie came from another direction.He set beauty free.
His women could be powerful, funny,…….. Pause. Because Carol Burnett had us rolling on the floor wearing the curtains (Bob Mackie again) in the skit that was playing on an important plot point in Gone With the Wind. Rolling on the floor I tell you.
Continuing…..outrageous, elegant, sexy, strange, glamorous, theatrical or all of those things before the commercial break.
Most importantly, they did not all become the same woman. Signature not sameness.
Diana Ross remained Diana Ross.
Dolly Parton remained gloriously Dolly.
Tina Turner looked like nobody else alive.
Cher could walk onto television looking as though somebody had raided a jewelry store on another planet, and somehow it made perfect sense.
Carol Burnett could be turned into a glamorous movie star or dressed in one of the funniest costumes in television history. Mackie himself later said that being able to do funny as well as beautiful was one of his greatest strengths. He designed The Carol Burnett Show throughout its eleven-year run.
That range tells us something.
He was looking at the woman in front of him.
And Then Tina Walked Out Looking Like Fire
One of my favorite examples is Tina Turner.
Mackie’s famous Flame Dress, designed for Turner in 1977, used red and gold sequined strips over a nude base. The movement was part of the design. Those pieces flew and shimmered around Tina’s body as she moved, exaggerating the drama of those brown legendary legs.
Mackie understood that Tina wasn’t going to stand there politely displaying a dress.
Tina was going to work that thing.
The Victoria and Albert Museum later featured the Flame Dress in its DIVA exhibition. Mackie remembered designing for the body and movement Turner actually brought to the stage.
That is the difference between putting clothes on a famous woman and designing for her.
Tina’s strength did not require her beauty to be suppressed. Her power did not require masculinizing her. Her athleticism did not require pretending sensuality had disappeared.
She could be powerful and breathtaking at exactly the same time.
Cher Never Needed a Boring Night
Then there was Cher.
You could watch The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour partly to see what on earth she was going to come out wearing next. (Uh, because that is what little Tonya was doing.)
Mackie later recalled that Cher wasn’t intimidated by elaborate costumes. CBS reported his observation that the clothes themselves became one of the attractions of the show. Their partnership stretched across decades and eventually became so culturally significant that Mackie returned to recreate famous looks and design new ones for the Broadway musical The Cher Show, winning a Tony Award for costume design.
A costume designer helped create such a recognizable visual language around one performer that decades later, you could tell her life story partly through the clothes. Cher could be nearly naked, and somehow the impression wasn’t desperation. We were there, and she was Cher. Aura.
There was wit in it. Confidence. Illusion. Mischief. A delicious amount of glamour.
Mackie understood the difference between a woman wearing very little because somebody wanted her displayed and a performer walking onto a stage fully aware that the entire room was there to take in her talent, her presence, her extraordinariness, and her uniqueness.
Dolly Got to Be More Dolly
Mackie understood Dolly Parton, too. That may sound simple until you remember how often designers try to prove themselves by transforming the person they are dressing into somebody else.
Dolly never needed rescuing from Dolly.
One memorable Mackie creation was a butterfly gown for the 1979 television special Dolly & Carol in Nashville. Its beadwork, rhinestones and sequins opened into the suggestion of butterfly wings when Parton raised her arms. She liked the costume enough to wear it again in later performances.
Of course she did. It understood her. Sparkle was not something Mackie imposed upon Dolly Parton. He entered a visual language she already spoke fluently and helped her speak it even louder.
He Did Not Have One Approved Kind of Beautiful Woman
This may be the part of Bob Mackie’s legacy I love most.
Look at the women who famously wore his designs.
Diana Ross.
Tina Turner.
Cher.
Dolly Parton.
Carol Burnett.
Mitzi Gaynor.
Liza Minnelli.
Donna Summer.
Whitney Houston.
These are not interchangeable women. Mackie’s official biography and the Television Academy document the remarkable breadth of performers he dressed across television, film and the stage.
He didn’t seem to look at every woman and think, How can I make her resemble my idea of beauty?
His work suggests another question:
What happens when we turn up the volume on what is already here?
That is an art. There are designers who make beautiful clothes. There are designers who create beautiful women in their own image.
Bob Mackie seemed capable of making a woman look more like herself.
More Tina. More Diana. More Dolly. More Cher.
And somehow, more fabulous.
Sexy Without Begging to Be Seen
I keep coming back to this because I think younger women are reaching for language around it now.
There was sexuality in Mackie’s work. Sometimes quite a lot of skin.
I don’t want to rewrite history and turn him into a modest dresser. No ma’am. No sir. That wasn’t it.
But much of the work carried a kind of theatrical confidence that feels different from simply displaying as much of a woman’s body as possible.
There was movement. Humor. Beading. proportion. Illusion. Character. Surprise.
The clothes participated in the performance.
Mackie once explained that when designing for performers, he thought about what audiences wanted to see them look like, especially in enormous venues. That helps explain the scale of his imagination. These were clothes meant to survive distance. A woman had to reach the person sitting way up there in the cheap seats.
He gave her something worthy of the entrance.
Give This Man His Flowers
Nine Emmy Awards. Three Academy Award nominations. Television Academy Hall of Fame. A Tony Award for The Cher Show. Decades of work with performers whose images became part of American cultural memory.
Yet awards still don’t quite explain the gift. The gift was seeing. He could look at a woman and imagine possibility.
He understood that glamour could be funny. Beauty could be powerful. Sexiness could have wit. Femininity could take up an enormous amount of space. A Black woman could be photographed like a treasure without becoming fragile. A middle-aged woman could still command the room. A woman could sparkle simply because sparkling pleased her.
He earned these flowers. May we remember the man who spent a lifetime handing women sequins, feathers, beads, movement, fantasy and enough room to become even more themselves. He didn’t cage the beauty.
He opened the door and let it walk onto the stage.
