Bob Mackie Age, Death, Wife, Children, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Bob Mackie

• Bob Mackie was born in Monterey Park, California.

• His father Charles Robert Mackie worked at Bank of America, and his mother was Mildred Agnes Mackie, née Smith.

• His parents divorced when he was young, and his maternal grandparents raised him in his early childhood in Alhambra, California.

• By the time he reached high school, he moved to Rosemead, California, and started living with his father.

• After school, Mackie joined Pasadena City College and later spent one year at Chouinard Art Institute.

• He left both institutions without completing a degree. At Chouinard, he studied under Eva Roberts, who headed the fashion design department.

• He left the institute early after he got his first job as a sketch artist for Frank Thompson at Paramount Studios.

• In 1962, as one of his first assignments, he drew the original sketch of the dress Marilyn Monroe wore at President John F. Kennedy’s birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden in New York.

• He also worked as a sketch artist for French couturier Jean Louis, who had designed stage gowns for Marlene Dietrich.

• On 14 March 1960, Mackie married singer and actress LuLu Porter, whose real name was Marianne Wolford.

• She later became an acting teacher. The couple had a son, Robert Gordon Mackie Jr, who came to be known as Robin.

• Between 1960 and 1963, Mackie worked under designer Ray Aghayan at Paramount Studios as a novice designer and assistant.

• In 1963, costumer Edith Head brought him in to work on the films Donovan’s Reef and A New Kind of Love.

• Mackie later said Edith Head taught him how to handle producers, directors and actors rather than how to design.

• That same year, his marriage to LuLu Porter ended in divorce.

• From 1963 onward, Ray Aghayan became his significant other, and the two remained partners for decades, working together through the 1970s along with taking on separate clients of their own.

• In 1966, Mitzi Gaynor hired Mackie to design her new stage show at the Riviera in Las Vegas.

• She became his first star client for an entire show, and he went on to design for her television specials and live shows for the next fifty years.

• During her second network special, she wore a form fitting nude illusion gown made from a knit fabric called souffle, and this gown influenced how many entertainers’ costumes were constructed in the later years.

• In 1969, Mackie designed costumes for Diana Ross, the Supremes and the Temptations for the television special G.I.T. on Broadway.

• In 1972, Mackie and Ray Aghayan received an Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design for Lady Sings the Blues, which starred Ross.

• Mackie designed costumes for the Las Vegas shows Hallelujah Hollywood, which ran from 1974 to 1980 at the MGM Grand, and Jubilee, which ran from 1981 to 2016.

• Both shows had elaborate and detailed costumes, and many of his design drawings from these productions are kept in the Donn Arden papers archive at the UNLV Libraries Digital Collections.

• He won two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Costume Design for Mitzi Gaynor’s television specials, Mitzi Roarin in the Twenties in 1976 and Mitzi Zings into Spring in 1977.

• He also designed concert costumes for Elton John, including a Donald Duck outfit, a sequined Los Angeles Dodgers costume and a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart costume.

• In 1981, Mackie appeared as himself in two episodes of the television series The Love Boat.

• In March 1986, he designed the outfit Cher wore to the 58th Academy Awards, which included black stretch pants, a bejeweled loincloth, knee high boots, a black chainlink top and a tall feathered mohawk headdress.

• Mackie also designed splashy evening gowns for Whitney Houston, which she wore for concert tours and award shows over many years.

• Through his career, he won nine Primetime Emmy Awards for his designs and picked up three Academy Award nominations along the way.

• In the late 1980s, Mattel approached Mackie to design outfits for Barbie dolls.

• His first limited edition doll came out in 1990 with a gold outfit, a sequined skirt, a feather boa and a long ponytail, and this look came before Madonna wore something similar during her Blonde Ambition World Tour.

• Mackie became the first designer to also work on changes to the doll’s face and hair, and a closed mouth smile he introduced came to be known as the Mackie sculpt among collectors.

• He pushed for different ethnicities and traditional garb to be represented in the dolls, drawing from his experience of working with many different women in fashion shows.

• Mackie’s son Robin, who worked as a makeup artist, died in 1993 at the age of 33 from an HIV or AIDS related illness linked to drug use, and he passed away before his parents.

• In 2002, the Television Academy inducted Mackie into its Hall of Fame. The same year, he designed Liza Minnelli’s wedding dress for her wedding to David Gest.

• His biographer Frank Vlastnik later described him as the Crown Prince of the Imperial Monarchy of the Island of Bling.

• Mackie recalled that the planning for Minnelli’s wedding was nuts and that the scene at the church was absolute pandemonium.

• Mackie and Ross kept working together well into the twenty first century, and he designed the stage costumes for her 2010 tour, More Today Than Yesterday, The Greatest Hits Tour.

• Between 2008 and 2011, Mackie created the costumes for Cher’s Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace.

• Ray Aghayan, his partner since 1963, died in 2011. In 2017, Mackie designed the costumes for Cher’s Classic Cher shows in Las Vegas and Washington DC.

• In 2019, he won the Tony Award for Best Costume Design in a Musical for his work on the jukebox musical The Cher Show, in which he also appears as a character.

• During his final years, Mackie remained best known for designing Cher’s elaborate outfits for her later tours, including the Here We Go Again Tour.

• In 2020, Wheel of Fortune hostess Vanna White wore Mackie’s dresses through the week of 27 April on the show, as part of a tribute to the San Francisco Bay Area.

• In 2024, a documentary titled Bob Mackie, Naked Illusion showed that Bob and LuLu had stayed close over the years and had discovered they shared a granddaughter together, along with two great grandchildren.

• On 24 January 2026, the Palm Springs Art Museum honoured Mackie at its Art Party 2026 Gala.

• The museum also put up an exhibit called Reflections of Glamour, Bob Mackie, featuring five of his gowns and sketches of his work spanning from the 1970s to the 2000s.

• Mackie died on 14 September 2026 at a hospital in Palm Springs, California, from pneumonia, at the age of 87.

• Over his career, Mackie received ten Emmy Awards, one Tony Award and three Academy Award nominations for costume design.

• People called him the Sultan of Sequins, the Rajah of Rhinestones and the Guru of Glitter for his sparkling and imaginative designs.

• He once said a woman who wears his clothes is not afraid to be noticed.

• Mackie also created every costume for The Carol Burnett Show through its entire eleven year run, including the famous curtain dress worn in the Went with the Wind sketch, which was later donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

• Carol Burnett credited Mackie with adding comic touches to her characters, such as the tight fitting skirt for Mrs Wanda Wiggins, Mr Tudball’s secretary.

• Burnett had told him the skirt looked too loose at the back for her figure, and he suggested she stick her bottom out to fill it, which gave the character her distinctive walk.

• Burnett also said Mackie used rice instead of cotton in the undergarments of his older woman characters so their saggy chests moved naturally as the actresses walked or danced.