When Marilyn Monroe sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to John Kennedy in 1962, the dress she wore was so tight she had to be sewn into it. That dress was signed by Jean Louis. The sketch was drawn by a twenty-three-year-old illustrator in his studio - Bob Mackie.

Mackie died on 14 September at the age of eighty-seven. Born in California in 1939, he worked with Edith Head at Paramount, and in eleven years on The Carol Burnett Show he built the reputation that followed him for life - "the sultan of sequins".

Cher wore it, he wrote the dictionary

If one relationship explains his career, it is the one with Cher. Almost every look of hers that people can call up from memory is his - including the one from the 1986 Oscars, when she turned up in something the Academy clearly was not expecting. That was not a costume; it was a statement about who decides where the line of decency sits.

The list of women he dressed reads like a survey of American pop music: Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Dolly Parton, Madonna, Elton John. Nine Emmy awards. Three Oscar nominations. Induction into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. And a Tony in 2019 for best costume design for The Cher Show - recognition that arrived fifty years after he started.

What made him different

Fashion teaches us that elegance is restraint. Mackie worked on the opposite assumption: that the stage demands clothing visible from the back row, and that the woman standing there has the right to take up more space than she has been allotted. The sequins, the feathers, the sheer fabric - those were tools for visibility, not for scandal. The scandal was a side effect.

His Barbie dolls were the same idea in a smaller format: collectors' items made not for children but for adults who understand that design is a signature.

Now Miley Cyrus, Zendaya and Sabrina Carpenter are pulling from his archive and wearing it as if it were new. That is the cleanest indicator of how far ahead he was - when something made fifty years ago can appear on a red carpet today and nobody asks which decade it came from.