Bob Mackie, who dressed the Star Wars Holiday Special, dies at 87

The designer behind Cher’s most famous looks and Carol Burnett’s curtain-rod dress also created the costumes for one of the strangest hours in Star Wars history. Disney rebuilt those costumes from scratch in 2024.

Bob Mackie died Monday in Palm Springs, California, of pneumonia. He was 87.

His family confirmed it on his social accounts. “It is with a heavy heart that we share the news,” the statement read, describing a man who spent his years doing the only job he had ever wanted.

He dressed Cher, Carol Burnett, Diana Ross, Tina Turner and Dolly Parton. He was nominated for three Academy Awards, won nine Emmys out of more than 30 nominations, and in 2002 became the first costume designer inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

He also spent part of 1978 designing clothes for Wookiees.

What did Bob Mackie design for Star Wars?

The costumes for The Star Wars Holiday Special, the CBS variety hour that aired Nov. 17, 1978, and has spent nearly half a century as the franchise’s most argued-about hour of television.

Mackie’s fingerprints are all over it. Harvey Korman‘s four-armed alien chef Gormaanda. Art Carney‘s trader Saun Dann. Diahann Carroll‘s Mermeia. Bea Arthur‘s cantina bartender Ackmena.

And the holographic circus troupe that Chewbacca’s son watches early in the special, in bright green, orange and hot pink, performed by acrobats, jugglers and a ringmaster.

Most of that wardrobe still exists, along with Mackie’s original design sketches.

Why Disney rebuilt Mackie’s Star Wars costumes

In 2024, Skeleton Crew put that circus troupe back on screen.

Series co-creators Jon Watts and Chris Ford wanted to reuse the hologram footage from 1978 outright. They could not. The angles were wrong, and the sequence had been shot for a different kind of camera and a different kind of show.

So costume designer Louise Mingenbach went to Skywalker Ranch, pulled Mackie’s original wardrobe sketches out of the archive, and rebuilt every costume from scratch. The performances and the music had to be matched too. The stunt coordinator, a former Cirque du Soleil performer, danced the lead.

Forty-six years later, a Disney+ series thought Mackie’s work was worth recreating detail for detail rather than approximating. That is not something the Holiday Special gets said about it very often.

What else did Bob Mackie work on?

A career that touched nearly everything on American television for four decades.

His Oscar nominations came for Lady Sings the Blues, Funny Lady and Pennies From Heaven. He designed for John Travolta in Staying Alive. He built more than 600 costumes for The Cher Show on Broadway.

He designed a long-running line of Barbie dolls, which is how a lot of people first encountered his name without knowing it.

The Carol Burnett Show curtain-rod dress, worn in the Gone With the Wind parody, sits in the Smithsonian.

And his designs kept showing up on stages long after the shows that made them famous went off the air, worn by performers who were not born when he made them.

Tributes

Burnett, who worked with him for years, posted that sadness did not come close to describing how she felt.

Mackie’s own explanation of the work was simpler than the clothes were. He told CBS last year that his process was watching performers move, work a stage, sit down. You cannot just put a dress on anybody, he said.

Which is roughly what a costume designer does that a fashion designer does not. You dress the person, and then you dress the thing they are about to do.

Somewhere at Skywalker Ranch there is a folder of sketches from 1978 that somebody had to go find in 2024 because the work still held up.

Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.

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Hat Tips:

• CBS News with The Associated Press (Sept. 14, 2026), the death, the cause confirmed by his publicist, and the family statement

• Variety (Sept. 14, 2026), the awards record and the Star Wars Holiday Special credit

• StarWars.com (January 2025), Jon Watts and Chris Ford on rebuilding Mackie’s costumes for Skeleton Crew, and Louise Mingenbach’s archive work

• CNN (Sept. 14, 2026), the Instagram statement and career overview

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