Black-ish Star Tracee Ellis Ross on Her Thierry Mugler Breakout Modeling Moment

“I would not call it my ‘supermodel days’!” Tracee Ellis Ross giggled into the phone. The uproariously funny star of TV’s Black-ish gently brushed aside that characterization of the glamorous and rather felicitous start to her early-’90s modeling and fashion career.

 

I quibble: Doesn’t flying the Concorde at just eighteen years old with the ultimate supers Linda, Christy, and Naomi to make your runway debut in Thierry Mugler’s now-legendary “Butterfly” show in Paris alongside your equally legendary mother, Diana Ross, count as at least supermodel adjacent?

“Well . . . my foray into the modeling world then!” Ross happily concedes. Fair enough.

 

After all, before keeping American television audiences in stitches as Rainbow Johnson, the lovable, quirky mother of four on ABC’s runaway hit, Black-ish, or as the neurotic but no less fashion-forward lawyer, Joan Clayton, on Girlfriends, Ross enjoyed a robust fashion career, which is being honored tonight at Harlem Fashion Row’s New York Fashion Week Award Ceremony. From walking Mugler’s runways, sitting for famed photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, Herb Ritts, and Peter Lindbergh, to stints as a fashion editor at Mirabella and New York, Ross rose up alongside industry insiders like Joe Zee and Carter Smith.

But it all started with a phone call from Mugler, himself: The German-born designer of fantastical, sculptural, and sci-fi-influenced designs rang Tracee’s mother, asking the R&B diva to walk his over-the-top Spring 1991 “Butterfly” collection. Ms. Ross agreed, but only on the condition that then-17-year-old Tracee join her on the catwalk. Plastering her bedroom walls with images of Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista and pilfering from her mother’s own legendary closet, Tracee was obsessed with fashion and wanted in. “When my mom got that phone call, it was obvious by how she responded that she knew that for her daughter, this would be the end-all and be-all,” she recalls.

 

Onto the Concorde the Ross women went, with Evangelista, Turlington, and Campbell on board, to not only walk during Fashion Week but celebrate Tracee’s 18th birthday, which serendipitously fell on the same day as Mugler’s show. Bedecked in two ensembles—a bubblegum short suit, thick pantyhose, and flats, and a body-hugging dress—she was admittedly terrified. “But everyone was so supportive of my fear and they were with me every step of the way!” To cap off the big day, she celebrated with her mother, and the inimitable Grace Jones at a dinner hosted in her honor by none other than Azzedine Alaïa. “Great birthday, period! Top of the line. One of the best. Everything has been downhill from there. I peaked at eighteen!” laughs Ross.

 

Well, hardly: Mugler invited her back to walk in his Spring 1992 show. By then Ross was a student at Brown University and had just signed to Wilhelmina Models. Backstage, as she was dressed in a pair of latex pants and a racy iron bra with rhinestone dollar signs splashed across her chest, Ross was apprehensive and on edge about the provocative look. “I called my mom, because I was like, ‘Is it appropriate? Because I don’t think you can actually see my nipple, but can you see my breast and is that a problem?!’ ” It would take Naomi Campbell with her renowned candor to set Tracee straight, though. “Naomi said, ‘Do you want to be a model or not? ’ And I was like, ‘I do!’ and she was like, ‘Well, then you wear the clothes they give you. Thierry Mugler gave you this outfit, it’s for you, you wear it, and you walk down the runway and you own it! . . . Oh, I owned it!”

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