Bob Mackie has the golden touch, creating winning looks for the biggest stars on the planet — Marilyn Monroe, Cher, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Elton John, Pink — in a career spanning 60 years. It’s only fitting that amid all his sequins, sheer and souffle designs, there’s one he was admittedly “embarrassed” to call his own for years.
In the new documentary Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, Mackie reflected on designing Cher’s controversial look for her 1989 “If I Could Turn Back Time” video. In the film, out now, Mackie called the “seat belt” outfit — which was a sheer bodystocking other than two fabric strips forming a V on the front and a small back strip over her tattooed buttocks — “vulgar.”
“We put a lot of wild, sexy clothes on her at different times,” Mackie told Yahoo Entertainment. “Sometimes I’d say, ‘Well, you can’t wear that for this’ … an award show or whatever, and she would [disappointedly reply], OK.’ But she wanted to wear that. Bicycle pants were in, but see-through bicycle pants are really scary.”
Mackie, who had outfitted the singer for more than a decade at that point, including for the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour and the Cher show, said he agreed to design it — with Cher’s agreed-upon silence.
“I said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone that I designed this,’” he said with a laugh. “‘Don’t let anyone know this. I’m embarrassed,’ and she was fine about it. Now she admits that, no, it wasn’t so good.”
It was more than her outfit that caused a stir. Cher shot the video aboard the battleship USS Missouri with a couple hundred hungry sailors as extras. While a U.S. Navy spokesperson apparently reviewed the lyrics of Cher’s song, they didn’t fully examine her wardrobe for the video until she emerged to perform. The storyboards presented to Navy officials reportedly showed the sheer outfit, so there wasn’t much to be done.
There was so much backlash to the video — from her outfit to it being performed on a warship used in World War II. After complaints, MTV banned the video from airing until after 9 p.m.
Beyond Cher’s outfit, Mackie’s jaw also dropped at the singer’s choice to have her young son, Elijah Blue Allman, who was 12 at the time, play guitar in the video “with all these horny sailors on deck,” Mackie said. “I mean … you go: Ugh. And, of course, it played forever, and we’re still seeing it.”
With the passage of time — and many other wild outfits — Cher’s look has become more iconic than controversial.
“Nobody else could get away with it, let me tell you,” Mackie said, adding: “Who has a figure like that really — and a look that nobody else has?”
That wasn’t the only time one of Mackie’s designs for Cher was banned. While the “naked dress” has had a huge resurgence in Hollywood over the last several years, Cher wearing a feathered and sequined naked illusion dress, created by Mackie and Ray Aghayan, on the cover of Time magazine in 1975 also caused a kerfuffle.
Cher first wore the dress — made of souffle, a sheer fabric that is no longer in use because it is highly flammable — for a Vogue photo shoot with Richard Avedon and to her first Met Gala in late 1974.
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