The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute has yet to announce a replacement for its Spring 2027 exhibition, which was originally supposed to celebrate John Galliano.
That plan went down in flames. It became clear that many influential people were not ready to forgive and forget the designer’s past antisemitic statements, despite the fact that he still gets work in the industry and is a longtime friend of Met trustee and Vogue grandee Anna Wintour’s.
After this P.R. fiasco, the Met and Ms. Wintour should instead pick an underappreciated crowd-pleaser who understood, decades ago, the celebrity-first, red-carpet look that has taken over fashion: Bob Mackie, the Sultan of Sequins, who died last month at 87.
Mr. Mackie became famous as a Hollywood costume designer, not a member of Ms. Wintour’s inner circle. As Cher, one of his most well-known clients, put it in the 2024 documentary “Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion,” “Bob did costumes, and fashion people looked down on him for some reason.”
He won nine Emmy Awards — including the very first one ever awarded for costume design, which he shared with his then-partner Ray Aghayan — and was nominated for 23 others. He designed showstopping dresses for generations of performers from the 1960s to the 2020s: Tina Turner, Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton. Madonna, Whitney Houston and Beyoncé. Some of his more comic expressions — including the Scarlett O’Hara curtain-rod parody dress he designed for Carol Burnett — are now in the Smithsonian. He designed the dress Cher wore to the 1986 Oscars after she was snubbed for her performance in “Mask.” “As you can see, I did receive my Academy booklet on how to dress like a serious actress,” Cher tartly quipped from the podium.
Mr. Mackie understood the viral-dress moment before there was an internet to spread it.
The fashion world just never quite accepted him as one of their own. He never had much success with ready-to-wear. In an oral history for Vogue, he recalled that the Council of Fashion Designers of America wanted to honor him with a prize in 2001: “They wanted to give me something, but they didn’t know what to do with me, so they gave me an award for fashion exuberance, which I still think is funny.”
“Costume designers have long been overlooked for the importance of their work in creating and influencing mainstream contemporary fashion,” the designer Tom Ford told Vogue. “I think he could never really get a footing in the fashion world,” his longtime design director, Joe McFate, also noted.
It’s time for Mr. Mackie to finally get his due.
Mr. Galliano and Mr. Mackie actually have a lot in common. Over their careers, they have both displayed technical brilliance, meticulous craftsmanship, wit and showmanship. But there are differences. Mr. Galliano is a part of the hierarchical fashion system, rooted in runway shows, haute couture, socialites, ready-to-wear collections, “It” bags, perfume launches and big advertising budgets. The single-designer shows mounted by the Costume Institute are usually more in step with Ms. Wintour’s runway-fashion-first perspective. More often than not, they spotlight a designer known for practicing haute couture — Alexander McQueen, Gianni Versace, Karl Lagerfeld, Coco Chanel.
One might argue that a man who has designed thousands of costumes for weekly television shows and made dresses that can show off (and stand up to) Tina Turner’s performances is practicing couture of the first order. It’s also worth noting that the Costume Institute (as its name suggests) has its roots in the theater world of the Lower East Side, not Paris. It was begun in 1937 as the Museum of Costume Art, led by the Neighborhood Playhouse founder Irene Lewisohn.
These days, the Costume Institute often wants to play in the pop-culture sandbox but can end up feeling like it’s been sanitized for the Bergdorf Goodman shopper. Outsider subcultures like “Punk” and “Camp” and “Superheroes” lose their grit and authenticity when they become themes. They sound fun and draw people in, but invariably feel prim and bloodless.
A Bob Mackie show could also help the tarnished profile of the Met Gala. The $100,000-a-ticket “party of the year” has started to seem to some people an absurdist display of modern-day wretched extravagance. That was brought into stark and unpopular relief when Jeff Bezos, the executive chair of Amazon, and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, were brought on as honorary co-chairs for this past spring’s gala, the theme of which was “Costume Art.”
Mr. Mackie is popular and populist. Both the Met and Ms. Wintour could use that. And unlike some of the head-scratching themes the Met has cooked up over the years (“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”; “About Time: Fashion and Duration”), a Mackie-themed Met Gala would be about the razzle-dazzle. It should be an easy sell to persuade someone like the self-professed showgirl Taylor Swift to host.
His dazzling kinetic dresses cost thousands of dollars and worked far better on dancing theatrical performers than idle cocktail guests. But in the business of show, he was an equal-opportunity glamorizer. His dresses were spectacularly flattering, get-out-of-the-way glam. You could be built like Bette Midler, or Tina Turner or Cher. What mattered was where you were going and how you looked when you got there. That is most true on today’s mother of all red carpets: the one at the Met Gala.
Another of Mr. Mackie’s clients, RuPaul, told Vogue, “It’s too bad that people have sort of put him in the costume realm because it really is high art, actually.”
Time to show it in the Met museum.
David Colman has been contributing to The New York Times since 1996.
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