Bob Mackie, the legendary costume designer who turned sequins, rhinestones and sheer illusion into a Hollywood art form, died on September 14 at 87. For decades, his name was practically synonymous with excess: bigger headdresses, more sparkle, less fabric, and costumes that made celebrities look less like themselves and more like the most fabulous version of a character they could possibly play.
His influence is usually traced through Hollywood glamour — from Marilyn Monroe and Carol Burnett to Cher, Diana Ross and Madonna. But look a little closer at Mackie’s archive and another visual thread starts to emerge: turbans, Cleopatra fantasies, harem-inspired silhouettes, jeweled headpieces and entire collections built around imagined “Arabian” worlds.
Which raises a more complicated question: was Mackie actually drawing from Middle Eastern cultures, or was he participating in Hollywood’s much older fascination with an imagined, “exotic” East?
The answer, like most things Mackie, comes with plenty of glitter.
Who Was Bob Mackie And What Made Him Iconic?
Mackie was the ultimate designer for performers who understood that sometimes the outfit is the performance.
His career took off in Hollywood in the 1960s, eventually earning him nine Emmys, a Tony Award and three Oscar nominations. But his real legacy goes beyond the awards: he helped establish the idea that a celebrity costume could become a cultural moment in its own right.
One of his earliest legendary moments came in 1962, when, while working as a sketch artist for designer Jean Louis, Mackie sketched the now-iconic gown Marilyn Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy. The sheer dress was covered in thousands of hand-sewn crystals, creating the illusion that Monroe was wearing little more than light itself.
Then there was Cher.
Their decades-long collaboration produced some of the most recognisable — and unapologetically outrageous — looks in red-carpet history. Most famously, there was the 1986 Oscars look: black cut-out trousers, chainmail-style top and enormous feathered headdress. Cher had been snubbed for an Oscar nomination for Mask, and the outfit became fashion’s ultimate revenge dress.
Mackie wasn’t interested in making women disappear into clothes. He wanted the clothes to announce them.
And sometimes, that announcement came with a distinctly “Eastern” accent.
The “Sultan Of Sequins”
Mackie was famously known as the “Sultan of Sequins,” alongside nicknames like the “Rajah of Rhinestones” and “Guru of Glitter.”
The “Sultan” part was, of course, a playful reference to his obsession with maximalist embellishment — not proof of some grand Middle Eastern design philosophy. But it is hard not to notice how often Mackie’s visual language overlapped with the Western fashion fantasy of the East: gold, jewels, turbans, flowing silhouettes, exposed midriffs and elaborate headpieces.
She Could Be Anything
Mackie once explained exactly why Cher was such a perfect canvas for his imagination, and his wording is revealing.
“She could be anything. In those days, they didn’t feature Middle Eastern or Hispanic women, and she could be any ethnic persuasion.”
It is a fascinating quote because Mackie was recognising a genuine limitation in Hollywood: women who did not fit the industry’s narrow image of a leading lady were barely represented. Cher, in his eyes, could slip between those categories.
But there is another side to it. Ethnicity could become part of the costume.
Cher didn’t have to be Cleopatra, a harem girl or an imagined woman from somewhere in the “East.” Mackie’s clothes could make her look like one.
And that is where the Orientalism question becomes impossible to ignore.
Cher As Cleopatra
Take Cher as Cleopatra.
For a 1988 Halloween party and the launch of her Cher fragrance, Mackie dressed her in an intensely theatrical Egyptian-inspired look: a sheer black sequined dress with silver detailing, a dramatic Egyptian-style headpiece and serpent motifs.
It is pure Mackie: body-conscious, glittering, exaggerated and designed to read instantly from across a room.
But it isn’t really an attempt to recreate ancient Egyptian dress. It is Hollywood’s Cleopatra: metallic, sensual, mysterious, heavily embellished and instantly recognisable.
And that distinction matters.
Cher, Turbans And The “Exotic” East
The Cleopatra fantasy wasn’t an isolated experiment.
In 1975, Cher performed “Take Me Home, Country Roads” on The Cher Show in an extraordinarily camp Mackie look built around gold, sequins and a harem-inspired silhouette. In another telling detail, the performance paired the very Americana lyrics — “West Virginia, mountain mama” — with a look that reads like a glittering desert fantasy.
The song is about West Virginia. The costume seems to belong to an entirely different fantasy world.
Across his Cher looks, turbans, scarves, elaborate headwear and harem-like silhouettes repeatedly became part of that visual vocabulary. The effect was never really ethnographic. It was theatrical — a shorthand for somewhere glamorous, mysterious and decidedly elsewhere.
And that “elsewhere” is where Orientalism enters the picture.
Mackie Goes To “Arabian Nights”
For his Fall 2001 collection, “Foreign Intrigue,” Mackie leaned fully into that fantasy.
The show moved through different imagined worlds before arriving at an “Arabian Nights” finale filled with belly-dance-inspired looks, maharajah-style tunics and floor-length satin coats.
It was spectacularly Mackie: glamorous, theatrical and deliberately larger than life.
It was also a textbook example of how Western fashion has historically imagined “the East” — not as one specific place or culture, but as a seductive collage of jewels, satin, bare skin, elaborate headwear, royalty and mystery.
That is the tricky part of looking back at Mackie.
He didn’t invent Orientalism, and his costumes were rarely trying to make serious claims about the cultures they referenced. He was a costume designer whose entire job was transformation. But the fantasy he was working with still came from somewhere and sometimes “Middle Eastern” became a catch-all visual category for everything glamorous and exotic.
So, Was Bob Mackie Inspired By The Middle East?
In some cases, the references are obvious. Cleopatra. Turbans. Harem silhouettes. “Arabian Nights.” The very language surrounding some of his costumes points toward a Western fantasy of the Middle East.
But it would be a stretch to say that Mackie had one sustained Middle Eastern design philosophy, or that his work can be neatly traced back to a particular country.
What is more interesting is how Middle Eastern and “Eastern” imagery functioned inside his larger fantasy machine.
Mackie took whatever could make a woman look more dramatic, more glamorous, more impossible and turned the volume all the way up.
The result could be camp, empowering, spectacular and technically brilliant.
It could also reproduce the same old Western idea of the “exotic East” as a place of sensuality, excess and mystery.
Both things can be true.
And perhaps that is the most interesting part of revisiting the “Sultan” of Sequins now.
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