Tracee Ellis Ross can be very down-to-earth about her mother, superstar Diana Ross.

The Black-ish actor’s longtime friend and collaborator, writer and activist Michaela Angela Davis, recalled meeting Ross and her mom for the first time in the star’s Harper’s Bazaar cover story. The duo, who are executive-producing the upcoming docuseries The Hair Tales together, met while working for the lifestyle magazine Mirabella over two decades ago.

“I met Tracee in a closet. She was working in the fashion closet at Mirabella, and she was receiving clothes that I had pulled for a shoot,” Davis says. “I had no idea who she was, except for she was cute and she was a girl of color where there were none.”

“She was just so cool. She was that girl. And she wore a very sophisticated mix of designer and vintage. She’s got on Halston today, and yesterday she had on 1972 Céline because she was also wearing her mother’s vintage clothes. Hello! And she worked really hard, and she was focused,” she adds.

Ross was not a household name in those days, before started her acting career or landed her breakout role as Joan Clayton on Girlfriends. According to Davis, the star also wasn’t one to name-drop her mom’s name back then.

“She said, ‘My mother would love you!’ I said, ‘Okay, that’s cute. Your mother would love me.’ I thought maybe her mother was a society lady. So I get this address to go to the Sherry-Netherland. And it’s a different name, obviously. I go in, and the doorman lets me in. And I go up to the penthouse, and the elevator doors open, and Diana Ross is standing in front of me. That began our long friendship. We are both really interested in style and joy and justice.”

Ross also opens up to Harper’s Bazaar about prioritizing friendship and family throughout her life, both as the daughter of a music legend and as a television star herself.

“Because of the childhood that I had and my mother’s career, from an early age, even though I couldn’t define it at the time, I had to find a sense of home and safety within my body and with people. It wasn’t always about a space, and that remains for me,” she says.

“Home for me is about safety and embrace. It’s about shedding all the external masks that we have to wear out in the world. Home is really about beauty, safety, history. My friendships are home for me. My family is home for me. It’s an energetic connection that creates a sense of safety and groundedness, where I don’t have to wear any mask. I can just be myself,” she adds.

Source: Read Full Article