BOB MACKIE: Reflections of Glamour
Bob Mackie is an iconic American fashion designer best known for his bold, glamorous, and highly theatrical creations. Often called the “Sultan of Sequins,” Mackie built his reputation designing show-stopping costumes for stage, television, and film, blending Hollywood spectacle with couture-level craftsmanship.
He rose to prominence in the 1960s and became especially famous for his long-running creative partnership with Cher, designing many of her most unforgettable looks. Mackie’s work has also been worn by stars such as Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Elton John, and Carol Burnett. Over his career, he has earned multiple Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, and an Academy Award nomination, cementing his legacy as one of the most influential costume and fashion designers in American pop culture history.
Palm Springs has always understood glamour—not as excess, but as identity. So it feels entirely fitting that the desert city is celebrating one of the most audacious visual storytellers in American fashion: Bob Mackie, whose work now takes center stage at the Palm Springs Art Museum.
For more than six decades, Mackie has dressed the impossible. His costumes didn’t just adorn bodies; they created moments—television moments, red-carpet moments, pop-culture moments that still shimmer in collective memory. Sequins became punctuation. Beading became architecture. And the human form, under Mackie’s hand, became myth.
The Palm Springs exhibition offers more than nostalgia. It traces Mackie’s evolution from a young designer sketching costumes for Hollywood studios to the undisputed master of spectacle whose designs defined stars like Cher, Carol Burnett, Diana Ross, and Elton John. His creations are immediately recognizable: skin-baring silhouettes, impossibly intricate embroidery, and a fearless embrace of camp long before the term entered the cultural mainstream.
What makes this exhibition especially resonant in Palm Springs is the dialogue between place and persona. This is a city shaped by show business escape—by performers who came here to recharge, to reinvent, or simply to exist beyond the spotlight. Mackie’s work reflects that same tension between performance and freedom. His costumes are theatrical, yes, but also deeply personal, often celebrating individuality, queerness, and the power of self-expression in an industry that hasn’t always made space for either.
“His creations are immediately recognizable: skin-baring silhouettes, impossibly intricate embroidery, and a fearless embrace of camp long before the term entered the cultural mainstream.”
The museum presentation highlights Mackie not just as a designer, but as a draftsman and storyteller. Original sketches reveal a disciplined artist beneath the rhinestones—someone who understood proportion, movement, and the psychology of performance. You see how a feather placement could amplify a gesture, how a plunging neckline could signal confidence rather than provocation. Nothing here is accidental.
In a cultural moment increasingly obsessed with minimalism and understatement, Mackie’s work feels radical again. It reminds us that fashion can be joyful, excessive, and unapologetically entertaining—that it can celebrate fantasy without irony. In Palm Springs, a city that has always embraced theatrical living under desert skies, that message lands with particular clarity.
This exhibition isn’t just about what celebrities wore. It’s about how America learned to see glamour through television screens, award shows, and stage lights—and how one designer helped define that vision. Bob Mackie didn’t just dress stars. He made them larger than life.
And in Palm Springs, larger than life feels exactly right.
January 26, 2026 – March 30, 2026 |
