Bob Mackie on Cher’s iconic ‘naked’ dress: ‘She was never intimidated’
Nobody wears a “naked” dress quite like Cher.
Celebrities including Rose McGowan, Rihanna and Megan Fox have all made headlines in nearly-nude looks over the years, but the Goddess of Pop’s see-through, feathered Bob Mackie frock from the 1974 Met Gala might just top them all.
In a new interview with Town & Country, Mackie said Cher, now 76, insisted on wearing the daring look to the Met, dress code be damned.
“She was never intimidated by anything that I ever put on her,” he said. “She was just amazing in that department.”
In fact, Cher loved the shocking outfit so much, she later wore it on the cover of Time magazine.
Mackie also created the equally scandalous black sequined look the superstar wore to the 1986 Oscars, which included a tiny crop top, low-slung skirt and towering feathered headpiece.
“By that time, she’d been doing a lot of movies, but she was doing very unglamorous movies where she was playing just normal people,” Mackie said. “She wanted to wear something fun. She was very comfortable in her own skin.”
Mackie created many of the “Believe” singer’s looks starting in the late ’60s, when the pair met on the set of “The Carol Burnett Show” while they were both in their 20s.
“Cher came on and she said, ‘You’re so young. Everybody that we work with is so old. They’re over 30,'” he told Town & Country. “I said, ‘Well, I’m not over 30 yet, but I’m about to be there’ … Before I know it, I was getting calls to do specials that she was going to be on. She requested me.”
He’s still one of the “Strong Enough” singer’s biggest fans to this day.
“She had the most beautiful figure and skin, and looked different than the average pop star at the time. Most of the girls that were popular were all blonde, and they had beehives and flips, and there was Cher with her long, straight hair,” he recalled.
“I tell you, within a few months, every young girl in America had long, straight hair with it parted in the middle. The whole world changed.”
The fashion maestro wasn’t quite as adulatory when the conversation turned to modern-day style star (and fellow Cher fan) Kim Kardashian, who went viral by wearing Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress — which Mackie helped design while working with Jean Louis — to the 2022 Met Gala.
“When I heard that she was going to wear it, I thought, ‘Oh, nobody should be wearing that dress. It should be in a museum,” he told T&C, echoing his earlier statements about the polarizing red carpet moment.
