By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
There is a particular kind of dress that does not so much clothe a body as announce it. Bob Mackie has been making them for sixty years.
The designer's name may not carry the household ring of the stars who wore his work, but the silhouettes do: Marilyn Monroe's famously sheer, crystal-strewn gown for her 1962 serenade to President Kennedy; the towering, feathered spectacles Cher wore across three decades of television and stage; the glittering excess that Elton John turned into a second stage persona. According to a BBC Entertainment & Arts retrospective published this week, that lineage now stretches to a new generation — Miley Cyrus and Sabrina Carpenter among them — proving that Mackie's particular grammar of sequins, structure and nerve has not aged out of fashion so much as been rediscovered by performers who never stopped needing it.
What made Mackie's work durable wasn't shock value alone. His gowns were engineering as much as spectacle — beading sewn to hold a shape through two hours of choreography, necklines cut to survive a high note. That combination of craft and audacity is why costume historians still study him alongside couturiers who never touched a stage.
The BBC's photo survey, drawing on decades of red-carpet and concert archives, doesn't offer new interviews or commentary from Mackie himself — a limitation worth naming, since the piece is essentially a visual chronicle rather than a reported profile. But the images argue their own case: a designer who understood that fame, like fabric, needs structure to hold its shape.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know: worth a scroll, if only to see how little the language of glamour has actually changed since Marilyn hummed "Happy Birthday."
— Compiled from reporting and photo archives by BBC Entertainment & Arts.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."