WWD Bob Mackie to Receive Chicago History Museum Award

Written by Kristin Larson 

CHICAGO – Bob Mackie said he's "surprised and delighted" to receive the Costume Council of the Chicago History Museum's Designer of Excellence Award. 

"It's very amazing. Chicago is one of those places where when I was in the business of selling evening gowns, they were hugely receptive. Lots of hospitality," Mackie said in a telephone interview while en route to the museum. 

Mackie, who has dressed everyone from Judy Garland and Carol Bernett to Diana Ross, Cher and Rihanna, was quite modest about his longstanding career and being recognized by the museum.

"It's nice that people know you're still alive. I go to work everyday and I do my job. I don't think about it," said the designer, 77, who will accept the award Tuesday evening at a museum reception that will also feature a conversation with Hal Rubenstein.

"I was really surprised and delighted that they cared," Mackie said. "I love coming back to Chicago. It's a lot of fun. The city looks entirely different."

Fresh out of college, the young Mackie's first job was at Paramount Studios in L.A., where he worked as a sketch artist with designers Jean Louis and Edith Head. He then worked on "The Judy Garland Show," "The Carol Burnett Show" and "The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour."

"I was planning to come to New York and hit Broadway by storm. Instead I got a job in L.A. at Paramount Studios. There was an opening and I was at the top of the list. So I got the job," Mackie recalled. 

Coinciding with the museum award, Saks Fifth Avenue is featuring a selection of couture Bob Mackie designs, located in the foyer of the Fifth Avenue Club at the Saks on Michigan Avenue. The designer is also celebrating the 25th anniversary of his fragrance "Mackie" and has released a limited-edition bottle, $100, to celebrate the milestone. Purchase here.

PARIS VOGUE: November 2015

Bob Mackie: Couturier to the Stars

There are just 22 kilometers between Hollywood and Monterey Park, the town where he was born in 1940, and where he began his sequin fantasies by watching as many films as he could. “I didn’t become a costume designer because I dreamed of fashion and haute couture” he explained on the phone. “I always wanted to get into the entertainment industry, it totally fascinated me; I wanted to be in show business!” He enrolled in a design school, learnt to sew on a sewing machine that his grandmother gave him, created costumes for small, local theatre groups, and utilized his greatest skill, drawing, to building a portfolio that he would take around the whole of Los Angeles. It soon became a convincing calling card.

See them here

VANITY FAIR - June 2014

Across America, the nation’s gay uncles are rejoicing. They are streaming out of their condos and onto the streets of South Beach and Palm Springs, so happy are they with this most wondrous news. Cher and Bob Mackie have reunited. It’s true. Though Cher embarked on her latest farewell tour sadly Mackie-less—he was just too busy to make costumes for her—she recently tweeted something saying that she and Mackie were teaming up for the second leg of her tour. So how about that. I mean, it wouldn’t be a Cher tour without Bob Mackie costumes, would it? I feel kinda bad for the people who saw her on the first half of her tour, when she was not back working with her trusty collaborator. I guess they’ll have to go see her again. And you know what? They will. They most definitely will. People who are shelling out for Cher tickets at this point, nearly 16 years after “Believe,” are lifelong, diehard fans. So they will go again to see the Bob Mackie garments. They will put extra food in the cat’s bowl, they will change their answering-machine message (they still have answering machines!) to something sassy, and they will drive off into that desert night, into that Florida afternoon, and they will go see their hero, their queen. That is what America’s gay uncles will do, now that Cher has come to town clad in all the regalia she’s meant to wear.