Once or twice, we’ve done both halves of a straight couple, but this is the first time we’ve covered the partner of someone who has already appeared in one of the columns. Bob Mackie, of course, barely needed an introduction even before he got his write-up, and if you still don’t know who he is, Google Cher and she’ll appear in any number of his ensembles. But Bob Mackie literally used to work as an assistant to Ray Aghayan, and they were together for nearly fifty years, only separated by Aghayan’s death at age 83.

I will grant you that Aghayan’s designs were never as iconic as Mackie’s. He wasn’t a bad designer, but there are few costumes that he worked on that live on in pop culture fame, or even infamy, the way some of Mackie’s do. On the other hand, that’s okay. For one thing, as I was going through his IMDb page, I discovered that he did the costumes for the Cary Grant movie Father Goose, wherein one of the best parts is the outfits designed by the characters after stealing clothes from Cary Grant’s character. Which is iconic to me, at least, even if it isn’t the same as the Went With The Wind dress.

But also, you know, everything Aghayan worked on was something that needed costuming. I didn’t like The Glass Bottom Boat, but Doris Day needed to wear costumes in it. The ‘67 Doctor Dolittle. And what he appears to have done a lot of that I don’t hear talked about much is that he did costumes for awards shows, and also the opening and closing ceremonies for the 1984 Olympics, which I watched at the time. He did 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee, which I’d never heard of and now desperately need to see.

And, of course, I’m going to go ahead and assume that his IMDb page is incomplete. They all are, for people like this. There are enormous gaps in it, including most of the ‘80s. I refuse to believe he only did three things that would appear on IMDb for the entire decade. His bio is short; his Wikipedia page is not much longer. It’s longer than a lot of other people we’ve covered here, inasmuch as he has one at all, but there’s still only so much information available. I could probably track down more than what’s on those pages, but it would take a lot of work and I’d still probably be missing things.

What fascinates me is that his career started, he was thirteen years old. He came from a wealthy Iranian family, back in the ‘20s. At age thirteen, he designed a dress for the first wife of the last shah. That is bizarre to me for a whole list of reasons, and Wikipedia just throws this out as a fact, like this is a thing you should know is true. Why did he end up in that position, and in 1941 at that? No clue. Surely it could not have been true that all the adult costume designers were at war. That’s weird, and I want more information that I am not likely to get.

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