The designer Bob Mackie strolled through a gallery at the Soho Grand Hotel one recent afternoon while a team installed a show featuring his fashion sketches of divas like Cher, Madonna and Tina Turner, which became his blueprints for the glitzy dresses that electrified their personas on the stage.
Mr. Mackie, slightly tired from his journey from California to New York but still upbeat, considered his sketch of Cher’s black jeweled and black feathered outfit from the 1986 Academy Awards: “It turned Cher into this amazing exotic odd being — she seems not real, and yet, she is.” Then he considered his drawing of Elton John in a bedazzled pink jumpsuit: “I told Elton he could be a new age Liberace, and I guess that’s kind of what he became.”
But Mr. Mackie paused when he arrived at his 1991 sketch of Madonna wearing a shimmering gown that paid homage to Marilyn Monroe. He furrowed his brow at the photograph beside it, of a young pop star wearing the same dress.
“Oh god, what’s her name?” asked Mr. Mackie, now 86. “She’s that new girl. Sabrina.”
He meant Sabrina Carpenter, who wore the dress as a scene-stealing vintage piece to last year’s MTV Video Music Awards.
“Her stylist found it for her,” he said. “I’m not so familiar with her music, but just look at her, she’s really pulling it off.”
Nearby was a photograph of Zendaya wearing a midriff-baring number to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “And just look at Zendaya in this dress inspired by one I made for Cher,” he said. “It’s bold to wear what Madonna or Cher once wore, but she’s really pulling it off, too.”
Mr. Mackie was glad to be back in New York — he’d enjoyed a Broadway show and a burger at Joe Allen two evenings before. This is a fashion town that hasn’t always loved him back, though, a situationship that dates back to his bugle beaded rise to fame. He was once known here as the “Sultan of Sequins” and the “Rajah of Rhinestones” and was at times dismissed by the “snobs of Seventh Avenue,” as the critic Cathy Horyn wrote in 1991, a couple decades into his career.
As Mr. Mackie contemplated the new generation of stars wearing his designs, he wondered if the mood might be changing. “Maybe fashion people are looking at my stuff again and thinking, ‘Hey, it’s not so bad,’” he said. “They always used to be snotty with me. They saw me as ‘Mr. Hollywood.’”
At the opening party for the show, “Bob Mackie: From Sketches to Spotlight,” the gallery began to fill with young fans who were eager to meet him. He posed with them in selfies, smiling while tugging at his bow tie, and signed someone’s boxed Bob Mackie edition Holiday Barbie.
The actress Hari Nef browsed the gallery with a friend, David Velasco, the former editor of Artforum. They studied Mr. Mackie’s sketches of Diana Ross.
“The Bob Mackie woman wants to be seen, to take up space,” Ms. Nef said. “She’s not concerned with any of that late-20th-century seriousness so many actresses are occupied with. The Mackie woman is in showbiz, and she’s here to put on a show.”
“I don’t think he cared to play the game like everyone else,” she continued. “He didn’t play the media game or the fast fashion game. The legacy of Mackie is you’re lucky to even wear it. He’s not populist, he’s exclusive, but that’s why I’m drawn to it. I’d love to wear him, but wouldn’t even know how to make that happen. I feel I’m not ready for it, like, I’m not at the place in my career that even merits the drama of wearing a Mackie original. But when I am, I plan to ask.”
Matthew Ellenberger, a stylist who has worked with Steven Klein and Inez and Vinoodh, considered Mr. Mackie’s influence, stretching from the 1970s, when he outfitted stars like Bette Midler and Ann-Margret, to present day.
“Bob Mackie is fantasy,” Mr. Ellenberger said. “But you get to the 1990s, and that’s no longer in vogue, and an entire generation becomes anti-glamour. Helmut Lang and Jil Sander are in. But pop and glamour are now back, so it makes sense young stars like Zendaya want the Mackie look.”
As waiters wended across the carpeted gallery serving wine, a line of fans formed so that Mr. Mackie could sign the souvenir T-shirts they had purchased featuring his sketch of Cher in a glittering (and never realized) unicorn costume. Towering over him as she said hello was Dianne Brill, the 1980s It Girl whom the press once called Queen of the Night, standing 6-foot-3 in platform boots with big blonde hair.
“Why was Mackie misunderstood?” she said. “I think it’s because he embraced glamour and designed to make women look sexy. Because there’s a chord of puritanism in American fashion. It’s the same preference for minimalism you see in the pages of Vogue. And Mackie went against that.”
Sitting at the Soho Diner that morning, Mr. Mackie looked back on his life and career. With his boyish hair neatly combed and wearing a white sailor-style striped shirt, he sipped his coffee as he took in the scene around him.
“Everyone’s always wearing black in this city,” he said. “I’m not a New York guy.”
Born in 1939 in Monterey Park, Calif., Mr. Mackie was the son of a military man and a homemaker and he grew up in an austere household. His grandmother raised him after his parents divorced, and he found escapism as a boy in the stardust of Hollywood, becoming enthralled with musicals like “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “An American in Paris.” He held his first stage spectacles atop his dresser with a Betty Grable paper doll he dressed in costumes.
“I’d use Coke bottles to hold my stage sets in place on the dresser,” he said as he nibbled on a croissant. “For music, I’d put on a 45 record of ‘Shrimp Boats Are a Comin.’”
After studying at the Chouinard Art Institute, Mr. Mackie headed to Hollywood to work for the fabled costume designers Edith Head and Jean Louis. It was for Mr. Louis that he drew the sketch of the dress Marilyn Monroe wore during her birthday serenade to President John F. Kennedy.
“My publicist doesn’t love when I talk about it, but I still think it was wrong when Kim Kardashian wore that dress,” he said, referring to Ms. Kardashian wearing it to the 2022 Met Gala. “It wasn’t made for her.”
When Mr. Mackie was 20, he married LuLu Porter, a singer and actress, and they had a son before divorcing in 1963. As he began working on “The Judy Garland Show,” he started assisting the costume designer Ray Aghayan, who became his partner and collaborator. And in 1967, Carol Burnett hired Mr. Mackie for her new variety television program, and he would design some 17,000 costumes over 11 seasons of the “The Carol Burnett Show,” minting his reputation as showbiz’s couturier.
After her show ended, he decided to try his luck in New York, and he moved to Manhattan in the 1980s to work on Seventh Avenue alongside Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta. He introduced a ready-to-wear line, Bob Mackie Originals. But he soon sensed a cold shoulder.
“I was an outsider, even though they all knew who I was,” he said. “I was coming in and doing something different. ‘How dare he,’ they thought.”
Mr. Mackie’s ready-to-wear line folded in 1993, and that same year he endured a personal tragedy when his son, Robin, died from AIDS.
“It was an unhappy time in my life,” he said. “What he went through made me so miserable. I had no choice but to move forward and keep working to distract myself.”
“I did 10 years in New York, but I was happy to get back to Los Angeles,” he added. “What I always wanted was to work in showbiz, not in fashion. I don’t get upset about the past.”
A waiter, wearing all black, dropped off the check.
But as time passed, New York gave Mr. Mackie his due. The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology held a retrospective in 1999, “Unmistakably Mackie,” and on its opening night, crowds of industry luminaries packed inside to behold his bedazzled creations, including Liza Minnelli and Ms. Burnett, who appeared by his side.
Finally, when he turned 80, Mr. Mackie accepted his first Tony Award for his costume design on the “The Cher Show,” a Broadway musical about the singer’s life that served as a tribute to his shimmering works. That same year, Anna Wintour invited him to the Met Gala to ring in the museum’s “Camp: Notes on Fashion” exhibition, where one of his gowns for Cher was shown.
As Mr. Mackie finished his coffee at the diner, ending his stroll down memory lane, he got ready to head outside to face all those New Yorkers wearing black. He’d soon get into an S.U.V. with his team to head to Midtown for an appointment, during which he’d drive past the Seventh Avenue stretch where he had once worked alongside Mr. Blass and Mr. de la Renta. He had an early flight back home to California the next morning.
But he didn’t seem in a hurry to leave the city.
“Maybe what I do wasn’t for everybody, but that’s fine,” Mr. Mackie said. “I could only ever be true to myself. Anyway, no one is supposed to make fashion for everybody, unless you’re designing for Target.”
Alex Vadukul is a features writer for the Styles section of The Times, specializing in stories about New York City.
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