Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion
(USA, 106 min.)
Dir. Matthew Miele
He’s been called “the sultan of sequins” and “the king of camp.” He’s the only fashion designer to be honoured with an awards from the Emmys, the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. And he’s synonymous with many iconic looks worn by actresses, singers, and divas in pop culture. He’s Bob Mackie, the legendary designer and arguably top costumer in entertainment. Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion chronicles his many fabulous looks and their journeys from work room to runway. But in many ways, a Mackie design captures the essence of a Hollywood star in ways that few garments do.
The clothes are obviously the big stars here even though Naked Illusion features a who’s who of talking heads. Besides Mackie, who provides full access to director Matthew Miele, but not necessarily much personal information, the documentary boasts legends like Cher, Elton John, Carol Burnett, Mitzi Gaynor, and RuPaul, along with designers like Tom Ford and Zac Posen, and pop stars like Pink and Miley Cyrus. It’s energetic and engaging. The film sparkles like a Mackie dress on the stage. When the film lights up, it’s an escape. It’s a celebration of women, their bodies, their energy, and their presence. But also the empowering feeling of how damn good it feels to wear something that makes you look really, really great.
Miele (Always at the Carlyle, Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s) offers a straightforward tour through Mackie’s closet. The film doesn’t take a chronological approach from birth to present. Instead, it looks at different racks in the Mackie warehouse, so to speak, with segments that explore his long-time collaboration with Cher, his designs on The Carol Burnett Show, his iconic movie threads, and some of his signature looks that created memorable moments in pop culture history.

Cher, fresh off regaling stories in Diane Warren: Relentless, offers perhaps the most pivotal voice in Naked Illusion. She’s an animated presence and seemingly remembers all the great gowns that Mackie designed for her on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. Of course, her stories would be the best since Cher’s Mackie gowns are the designer’s best. She passionately remembers the many costumes that Mackie fashioned weekly for her variety show. But she also tells of a master at hand, who helped fashion Tina Turner when she was doing gigs on the show while evading Ike. That stint, Cher recalls, inspired another partnership and some of Mackie’s most famous gowns as he decked out Turner in vintage threads she bought on the cheap in Paris. A few snips later, Turner’s memorable fringe-laden disco outfits became history.
Nothing in the Mackie oeuvre is quite as memorable, however, as his outfit for Cher at the 1986 Oscars. This story is easily the best as Cher tells how she got her revenge by upstaging everyone. Cher shares how she was totally pissed off that she wasn’t nominated when many people favoured her to win for Mask. (She won Best Actress at Cannes and earned a Golden Globe nomination.) She tells Miele that people didn’t consider her a “serious actress,” even though she’d just been nominated alongside Meryl Streep in Silkwood, but that perhaps because of such dowdy roles, they also forgot her star power.
Cher illuminates her collaborative relationship with Mackie as she dramatically unfolds the sketching of a design. A headpiece and a bare midriff later, and the rest is history. Miele shows how Cher got her revenge: every newspaper ran of photo of Cher in that dress, standing alongside Best Supporting Actor winner Don Ameche, perhaps the most inadvertent accessory in fashion history, while recapping the night.
Other key interviews illustrate Mackie’s sense for fashion, entertainment, and showmanship. Burnett reveals his great sense of humour, as he designed a reported 17,000 costumes for The Carol Burnett Show. Burnett zeroes in on her Gone with the Wind spoof in which she played “Starlet O’Hara,” who had to act quickly and impress her beau, but all her Southern estate had were some curtains. The archival clip that follows shows one of the best fashion sight gags, well, ever. Burnett cautiously but confidently descends the stairs in some refashioned curtains like a model strutting down a Parisian runway.
“I saw it in the window and I just couldn’t resist it,” she says with a straight face. It’s a hilarious feat of design. The audience laughter speaks to the feelings and the sense of awe that Mackie evokes with his work.

Elsewhere in the film, Miele highlights signature looks like one of Mackie’s earliest gigs: the dress that Marilyn Monroe wore while singing “Happy Birthday” to John F. Kennedy, and Mitzi Gaynor’s sequined stunner. Both dresses capture the titular illusion of nudity that often proves a Mackie signature. It’s also part of Cher’s scene-stealer at the inaugural Met Gala. Mackie tells some tricks of the trade that let a designer suggest nudity while keeping a woman mostly covered. Feats of chiffon and well-placed beads show a master at work.
Naked Illusion provides of a thorough sense of Mackie’s mastery of an art form. Some awkward pacing tacks on Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” video in which she appeared in a get-up that Mackie’s design director Joe McFate (who produced the film) likens to two seat belts shaped into a V. It’s a rare moment in which Mackie expresses disappointment with his work—a funny, if strange endnote to a celebratory affair. (Although if Mackie considers such an iconic video the low point of his career, then he did fairly well.)
Yet perhaps it’s also a fitting one. Mackie never really lets Miele inside. Everyone tells how a Mackie costume reveals all about a person, so the documentary feels somewhat off the rack in the way it dresses Mackie. He comes off great, but who he is as a man remains something of a mystery.
He’s not a big talker, either. Mackie’s a well-spoken interviewee: concise and clear. But give him a pause with hopes he’ll reveal something of himself, and he doesn’t.
Mackie only really gets vulnerable when Miele tries to ask the designer about his late son, Robin, who died in 1993 at age 33. Mackie still gets emotional, and Miele needs to ask around to learn the story from the designer’s peers. It’s the same with Mackie’s personal life. His ex-wife, Lulu, appears in the film, but there’s no overt hint to a current partner. Mackie’s past partner, Ray Aghayan, were together for years until his death in 2011. Even then, Aghayan’s name only really arises because Mackie talks about being his assistant. Miele simply doesn’t seem interested in Mackie’s personal life. Ask Mackie about camp, sequins, or beads, though, and he lights right up.
At the same time, one can unbutton this portrait of a fashion icon as a study of a workaholic. One obviously makes great sacrifices designing 17,000 costumes for one show alone over 11 years. At one point in the film, RuPaul talks about how drag lets him create a character from the outside in: donning a Mackie gown lets RuPaul transform like a superhero. For Mackie, that transformation may be inside-out. We only really get to see him through the lively expressions he fashions upon others. If he prefers to let the sequins sparkle for him, so be it.