Mackie grew up in California and told Vanity Fair last year about his start in the industry. “I was only 22 when I quit art school and went over to Paramount and got the job, and [Academy Award–winning costume designer] Edith Head asked me—she says, ‘Do you know how to do strippers?’” he said. “The ladies who drew for her only drew little costumes, which would be a coat and a dress that matched, or a suit. Those women were beautiful artists. They just didn’t do that.”

He married in 1960, soon became a father, and got divorced a few years later. In 1963 he met Ray Aghayan, a costume designer for The Judy Garland Show. The two remained partners in work and life until Aghayan’s death in 2011.

Mackie’s career was not without scandal. In June 1993, when Mackie was 53, Nikki Finke published “Trouble in the House of Mackie” in Vanity Fair. “When I’m working, I don’t want any distractions. They disrupt my creative flow,” Mackie said in an interview for the article. “I suppose I saw the business side of my company as just one big distraction, especially if the news was bad, which it was. I just didn’t want to know.”

She was catching the designer at a time when his influence in Hollywood was waning. He told Finke, “I do think sometimes women use Armani as a safety thing. They know they’re wearing Armani, and it can be so boring, and so plain, and so nothing. But yet they feel completely secure.”

Her story also chronicled “a cast of characters including psychics, tarot-card readers, and handwriting analysts…an office blessing (some might call it an exorcism) performed by an Armenian Catholic priest; a sizable loan from the Gambino crime family to the Mackie empire, complete with a Mob family wedding straight out of The Godfather; and dresses allegedly given away to Ivana Trump—and the garbageman’s wife—to pay off debts.”