No one wears a “naked” dress like Cher.
Celebrities like Rose McGowan, Rihanna, and Megan Fox have all made headlines over the years with near-naked looks, but the sheer, feathered Bob Mackie gown from the Goddess of Pop from the 1974 Met Gala could outshine them all.
In a new interview with Town & Country, Mackie said Cher, now 76, insisted on wearing the bold look to the Met, dress code be damned.
“She was never intimidated by anything I ever did to her,” he said. “She was just amazing in that department.”
In fact, Cher loved the shocking outfit so much that she later wore it on the cover of Time magazine.
Mackie also created the equally outrageous black sequined look the superstar wore at the 1986 Oscars, which included a petite crop top, a low-slung skirt and a towering feathered headpiece.
“By this time she had made a lot of movies, but she did very unglamorous movies where she played regular people,” Mackie said. “She wanted to wear something nice. She was very comfortable in her own skin.”
Mackie created many of the ‘Believe’ singer’s looks from the late ’60s, when the pair met on the set of ‘The Carol Burnett Show’ while they were both in their twenties.
Cher came up and said, ‘You’re so young. Everyone 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 got a call to do specials she would be up to. She asked me.”
He is one of the biggest fans of the “Strong Enough” singer to this day.
“She had the most beautiful figure and the most beautiful skin, and she looked different from the average pop star at the time. Most of the girls who were popular were all blonde, and they had beehives and flippers, and there was Cher with her long, straight hair,” he recalled.
“I’m telling you, within a few months every young girl in America had long, straight hair parted in the middle. The whole world has changed.”
The fashion maestro wasn’t so flattering when the conversation turned to modern style star (and fellow Cher fan) Kim Kardashian, who went viral 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 she would be wearing it, I thought, ‘Oh, no one should wear that dress. It should be in a museum,'” he told T&C, echoing his earlier statements about the polarizing red carpet moment. .