If you love something, set it free; if it comes back, it’s yours. That’s true of many things (significant others, boomerangs), and less true of others (house cats, the contents of Pandora’s Box). But when it comes to fanny packs, specifically that belonging to living legend Diana Ross, it turns out that those sage words do, in fact, apply.
By now I hope you’re familiar with Miss Ross’s viral tweet, posted on Saturday:
The details are tickling; the questions it provokes are perhaps even more so. Why was a woman who’s so glamorous that when she sweats she shines like a diamond shopping at Marshalls? Was Diana Ross wearing a fanny pack to be cheekily retro, or utilitarian? And isn’t the point of a fanny pack that it stays strapped to you so that you never lose it?
Diana’s daughter Tracee Ellis Ross helped frame her mom’s tweet (which deserves to be framed...and hung on a wall) on last night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! “Think of this as my mom and the grandmother of my siblings’ children—the grandma my mom, lost her fanny pack,” said Tracee. “She’s the cutest.”
Was it an ironic fanny pack? Negative—it’s no joke. “I know fanny packs are in now, but you know, she’s been wearing fanny packs for, like, years,” said Tracee, who says her mother cycles through fanny packs slowly.
Why was Diana Ross in Marshalls? Tracee isn’t quite sure, but she thinks it was a new experience for her mom, who brought an entourage of security and people to accompany her on her discount shopping outing.
There are still outstanding questions. What was in the fanny pack? Tracee doesn’t know. Money? License? How one actually loses a fanny pack, whose two jobs are to hold things and stay strapped, also went unexamined. But at least it happened, at least Diana Ross got her fanny pack back, and at least we got a wonderful story out of it.