How designer Bob Mackie made him a fashion icon – The Hollywood Reporter

At the 1959 American International Toy Fair in New York, an 11.5-inch plastic ingenue of unlikely bombshell proportions makes her debut. In its first iteration, Barbie was marketed as a “Teen Age Fashion Model” and was based on the German Bild Lilli doll that Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler had seen on her travels in Europe.

At the time, Bob Mackie was studying costume design at the now closed Chouinard Art Institute in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. He would go on to pursue a legendary career in fashion and entertainment, but already his eye for the female form was well defined. When he first saw Barbie, he wasn’t impressed.

“I didn’t think she was very fashionable,” he says of the doll, who originally wore a simple black and white Chevron swimsuit, hoop earrings and a ponytail. perky blonde horse.

He had no way of knowing that he would become one of the people most closely associated with transforming Barbie into a feminist icon, a star in her own right. Her global stardom will be on display again this month, when Greta Gerwig’s film about the mononymous toy, starring Margot Robbie, hits theaters on July 21.

Mackie, 84, has created 47 different dolls for Mattel, with a wide variety of face sculpts, body types and scenarios. Mattel may have created Barbie, but Bob Mackie did famous.

By the time Mattel approached Mackie to design her first Barbie in the late 1980s, her entertainment career was firmly established through her costume work on an assortment of Broadway and Las Vegas shows and television programs from varieties like that of Mitzi Gaynor. Mitzi… Roarin’ in the 20’s And The Sonny & Cher Show. He had dressed celebrities such as Judy Garland, Tina Turner, Cher, Diana Ross and Carol Burnett. It was Mackie who, as assistant to costume designer Jean Louis, sketched the dress Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang “Happy Birthday” to John F. Kennedy in 1962 – and which Kim Kardashian remade at the Met Ball 60 years later, a stunt that Mackie criticized. His designs earned him nine Emmy Awards and three Oscar nominations, including one in 1973 for Ross’ lady sings the blues. In 1982, the prolific designer launched his own ready-to-wear collection.

“There are fashion designers, but they can’t make costumes,” says Burnett, who estimates Mackie created 17,000 costumes for his iconic CBS variety show. “And then there are the costume designers who are not fashionable. But Bob does everything. He is the whole ball of wax.

Mackie’s first creation for Mattel was in 1990. It was a limited-edition “Gold” Barbie, complete with a long blonde ponytail, bellied top, gold sequin cascading skirt and feather boa . The fact that the doll seemed to foreshadow Madonna’s nearly identical look on tour soon after only confirmed Mackie’s odd feeling for the zeitgeist.

But Mackie quickly abandoned the prevailing trends of the time, in search of something new. “All American girls had blonde hair back then,” he says. “Once we started doing all kinds of hair colors and [lengths]it was a way to make Barbie anyone and look like whatever she wanted.

Although Mattel has partnered with several fashion designers since the early 1980s, including Oscar de la Renta, Donna Karan and Donatella Versace, Mackie is considered the first designer to create a complete doll. “Not just the fashion, but he was involved in the entire look of the doll, from the hair to the face,” says Bill Greening, senior designer and Barbie brand historian at Mattel.

Mackie is also responsible for introducing a new, more sophisticated expression for the doll – one that saw her transform into a multi-dimensional woman.

“When Mattel released a closed-mouth version of the superstar sculpt, it debuted on the Bob Mackie Neptune Fantasy doll. [in 1992], and that’s what the ‘Mackie sculpture’ was called,” says Greening. “It’s a sculpture beloved by Barbie collectors.”

Mackie’s maximalist aesthetic allowed Barbie to mature without becoming stuffy. “Mackie is all about [being] overdone in the most glamorous way,” says Greening.

Mackie’s dolls basically wore shrunken stitching. “I was a real costume designer. And I had no desire to make her look like the accountant or the flight attendant,” he says. “It’s more about fantasy. She could be anything we wanted her to be.

Known for her intricately detailed dresses for red carpets and the stage, often adorned with feathers, sequins, gemstones and artfully placed sheer sections, Mackie has permeated Barbie’s wardrobe – and, by extension, her identity. – with the same drama and flair his celebrity clients expected of him.

Mackie didn’t water down his approach to costumes for the petite Mattel superstar: “When you’re working with an 11-inch girl, it’s all about scale, scale, scale,” he says. The designer’s designs for Barbie often use beading and hand-embroidery techniques, as seen in her multicultural International Beauty collection which Mackie says are her favorites.

Mackie’s luxury doll designs were sometimes loosely inspired by visual designs he had created for the stage: his 1997 Jewel Essence collection for Mattel, for example, was an outgrowth of much dazzled costume work for great Vegas shows.

Mattel executives were won over by Mackie’s work on The Sonny & Cher Show and suggested collaborating on a Barbie whose outfit might resemble the one worn by Cher. She would become the first of several Barbie dolls based on Mackie’s Hollywood clients. Dolls inspired by Ross and Burnett will soon follow. (Burnett says she received hundreds of Burnett Barbies from fans asking for autographs.)

Mattel says it sells about 100 Barbie dolls per minute. This popularity is largely due to Mackie’s contributions over the years. “Whether we’re doing embroidery or sequins or sequins…we’re really trying to capture that Barbie-scale Mackie magic,” says Greening, who first worked with the designer on a series of Cher. Barbies recreating the singer’s memorable outfits over the years. the decades (including his controversial Native American costume from his 1973 “Half Breed” video).

Mackie’s celebrity-based Barbies weren’t the first to monetize fame. “In the 1930s, thousands of Shirley Temple dolls were made,” notes Mackie. “It’s not a new idea at all.” But his work was novel in that it featured an ambitious glamor seemingly unattainable on a large scale.

As part of her vision to expand Barbie’s reach, impact and authenticity as a cultural icon, Mackie was adamant that Barbie embodies different ethnicities and races and wears a variety of culturally specific clothing ( although rendered in its distinctly Mackie way). “All my fashion shows I had done with real girls, I was always hiring, you know, all colors and all kinds of ethnic types,” Mackie says matter-of-factly, objecting to the suggestion that his approach to representation was ahead of his time. “And why not? This is the world we live in.

For the American fashion designer, Barbie is not just an inanimate model on which to base his ideas and ideals, but a feminine power like those he has made a career out of dressing. Says Mackie, still resolute and imaginative, “She can be anything. She was everything.

This story first appeared in the July 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.