Diana Ross (b. 1944)
Filed under the name Diana · July 26, 2026
Diana Ross fronted The Supremes, one of the best-selling girl groups of all time, before going on to a celebrated solo career that's kept her a Motown legend for generation after generation of new listeners discovering her sound fresh. There's a visual quality to her whole era of Motown that I find endlessly appealing as a designer — the coordinated gowns, the choreography, the sheer intentional glamour of it, everything composed down to the last detail the way a great photograph is composed, nothing accidental about it. I play a lot of that older, warmer music now for the baby during the long stretches of pacing the apartment trying to get her down for a nap, and there's something about Ross's voice specifically that settles a room in a way a lot of newer music just doesn't manage. Building a defining group sound and then a whole separate defining solo sound afterward is basically two careers' worth of reinvention packed into one remarkable life.