bob mackie died monday at 87. he shared his first emmy with the man he lived with, and lost his son to aids in 1993.

via NBC News, CBS News and NPR, with the Washington Blade, Out and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Bob Mackie died on Monday morning in Palm Springs, at 87. The cause was pneumonia. His longtime publicist, Jenelle Hamilton, confirmed it.

He was born in March 1940 in the San Gabriel Valley, east of downtown Los Angeles, and he spent the next sixty years putting the most famous women in America in clothes that made them unmissable. Nine Emmys. A Tony. Three Oscar nominations and, in one of the Academy's longer-running embarrassments, zero Oscars. They called him the Sultan of Sequins and he earned it honestly.

The obituaries will lead with Cher, and they should. But the two facts that make his life a gay life rather than a glamorous one are further down every wire story, and they are these: he spent four decades with Ray Aghayan, the man he shared his first Emmy with and whom nobody in 1967 was willing to describe accurately. And in 1993 he buried his only son, who died of AIDS at 33.

the emmy nobody explained

In 1967 the Television Academy gave out an Emmy for costume design for the first time in its history. It went to two men. One was Bob Mackie. The other was Ray Aghayan, who had hired him as a sketch artist a few years earlier, and who was, for the next four decades until his death, the person Mackie lived his life with. Nobody said the second part out loud. They just went up and got the award together.

Aghayan died in 2011, at 83, of kidney failure. He was a costume designer himself, and he was the one who pulled Mackie in, hiring the kid who had dropped out of school to sketch, putting him on The Judy Garland Show. They worked together constantly and were nominated together, which in practice meant Hollywood spent forty years printing their names side by side on award ballots without ever printing what they were.

robin

Mackie was briefly married to Marianne Nicholson, and they had a son, Robert Gordon Mackie Jr., who went by Robin and worked as a makeup artist. Robin died of complications from AIDS on March 15, 1993, in Los Angeles. He was 33.

That was the year the epidemic was still killing more Americans aged 25 to 44 than anything else, and the year Mackie was at the height of his commercial fame, dressing the women on whose backs a generation of gay men had learned what glamour meant. He worked for another thirty-two years and almost never spoke about it publicly. It is the quietest line in every obituary printed this week and it is the one that will land hardest for anyone who lived through the same decade.

what he actually made

As a young sketch artist he dreamed up the sheer beaded gown Marilyn Monroe wore to sing happy birthday to a president. He did all eleven seasons of The Carol Burnett Show, which meant inventing an entire world every week, curtain rod included. He dressed Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Dolly Parton, Whitney Houston, Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Elton John and, eventually, Barbie.

In 1986 he sent Cher to the Academy Awards in black stretch pants, a bejeweled loincloth, knee-high boots, a chain-link top and a feathered Mohawk headdress roughly the size of a small car, which remains the most anybody has ever said at that ceremony without being handed a microphone. In 2019 he won a Tony for The Cher Show, in his eightieth year. Cher received the news in all caps: "I'M SO CRYING. BOB MACKIE DESERVES THIS AWARD MORE THAN ANYONE WILL EVER KNOW."

"A woman who wears my clothes," he said, "is not afraid to be noticed."

where his work lives now

Ask a drag queen. Mackie is quoted, copied and invoked on every season of Drag Race, in a line worn so smooth it functions as scripture: you are born naked and the rest is Bob Mackie.

Frank DeCaro put the mechanism plainly this week. "For gay kids sitting at home like me or RuPaul, looking for a way out of our drab surroundings, Bob Mackie was the portal. He made women look like drag queens, but in the best possible sense. He was a window into a glamorous, funny, inclusive glitter world."

Out named him to the Out100 last year, in the Groundbreakers class, which is what happens when a man outlives the era that would not describe him accurately and gets to watch the kids understand him perfectly. That inheritance is being squeezed right now, which is its own kind of grief note. The BBC canceled Drag Race UK mid-season this month. The rooms that taught a generation what a Mackie silhouette was are getting smaller in the same season he died in.

what the people who knew him said

Cher, who he dressed for sixty years: "My dear Bob has gone up to heaven. Knowing him, he's bringing Sequins, Beads, & his sketch pad. Good nite sweet Prince. Luv, Me."

Carol Burnett, eleven seasons and a curtain rod: "Sadness doesn't come close to how I feel. I loved him very much."

Elton John: "Every time I put something on that Bob made, I felt very, very special. His costumes were works of art, and he will go down as one of the most legendary designers ever in Hollywood. He loved glamour like I love glamour, but more than anything, we shared the same sense of humour and had so much fun together."

Barbra Streisand: "Bob Mackie was an incredible talent. He designed one gorgeous outfit after another for me."

His own studio, posting to his account on Monday: "His genius and extraordinary designs will live on forever, continuing to bring beauty into this world."

Kristin Chenoweth, Dana Delany and Laverne Cox posted tributes too. So did roughly every drag performer with an account.