Tracee Ellis Ross Spent 10 Years Building Pattern, Her Hair Care Brand
“These shoes are going to kill me,” Tracee Ellis Ross calls out to the costume designer, as she holds up a pair of Pradas.
Ross and the crew are on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif., deciding on outfits for the next episode of Black-ish, in which she plays the lead. The fitting department is a cramped, cluttered space in one of the soundstages, hemmed in by racks of clothes hung atop each other, bunk-bed-style, almost up to the ceiling — silky blouses, flared pants, dresses, heels, sneakers. (They snagged the Pradas on sale.) Everywhere you look, boards are tacked up with photos of the cast and set, scene breakdowns, press clippings, and sayings like “Behind every successful woman is a tribe of other successful women who have her back.”
Michelle Cole, the costume designer, has Ross’s back (and front). Rainbow “Bow” Johnson, M.D., the actress’s character, rarely wears the same thing twice — except for the shoes, because they’re usually out of the shot. Still, Ross is down for the Pradas. “I feel I would suffer for them,” she says.
“OK, and you’re able to walk?” Cole asks through the muffle of fabric.
“No,” says Ross. “I’m not able to walk in them. But I don’t really seem to care.”
That answer, in a way, is the rallying cry of an entrepreneur: This may not work — let’s do it anyway! It is also a good summary of Ross’s approach to life. Over and over again, she has stepped out without quite knowing how she’ll stay upright. Clearly, she’s done it in her Golden Globe–winning entertainment career, where she’s become known for a comic talent that curls and coils and pongs out of bounds, not unlike her signature galaxy of gravity-defying hair.
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But the same attitude has also led her, and it’s a line of products that’s as much about enhancing women’s natural, curly, coily, tight-textured hair as it is about restyling the way the culture sees those women. “Figuring out how to take an idea and pull it up into the atmosphere and into the third dimension? There’s just no road map,” she says. “I really had no idea how you turn a dream into goop. And I don’t mean Gwyneth Paltrow . I mean hair products. Like, how do you do that?”
