Tracee Ellis Ross may be a fashion superstar, with six new InStyle covers to prove it — but she insists that her mother, music legend Diana Ross, still has her beat in the wardrobe department.
The “Black-ish” star, 45, told the magazine that rifling through the racks in her mom’s storage unit is “like going to a museum.”
“When I hold some of her extraordinary original beaded stage clothes, there is a particular Diana Ross smell, a mom smell, a certain perfume that I just love,” Ross explained. “And sometimes, when you open the garment bags and there’s makeup or sweat or other evidence of the clothes being worn — I find it really extraordinary. It’s an artifact.”
Ross added that in addition to learning the art of “easy, no-pressure glamour” from her mother, she discovered how to use clothing to express herself.
“As a kid I saw my mom as the lady in the sparkly dress on the stage who sang, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found the language to articulate that what I was seeing was a woman in her full glory being in connection with this gift she was given, being glamorous and sexy but not in a way that’s ‘Look at me,'” Ross said.
“We live in a ‘Look at me’ culture. I was raised to view sexy as being at the height of your … self. Clothing was one of the ways you could wear your inside on your outside.”
Ross worked as both a model and fashion editor before becoming an actress, but clearly never lost her connection to couture: As the star of InStyle’s “best dressed” issue, she wears straight-off-the-runway looks by Giambattista Valli, Chanel, Gucci and more.