“Tina Turner was larger than life right up to the end,” her friend Bob Mackie, the fashion designer and collaborator on her most famous looks, said this week before the launch of Diva, a blockbuster fashion exhibition at the V&A in London, which features the late singer in a starring role.
Asked to assess how today’s divas match up with their predecessors, the 83-year-old designer, whose career spans designing for Lucille Ball and Doris Day to being a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race, seemed unimpressed.
With the taste for provocation that led him to dress Cher in a Mohawk headdress for the 1986 Oscars, he pointed out that Beyoncé’s first stage costumes were made by her mother, who “used to say, ‘I look at what Bob Mackie does for Cher’” he noted.
