Iman on Her Refugee Roots, Redefining Beauty Standards and Her Great Love Story with David Bowie

She has one of the world’s most famous faces but her voice is just as powerful. Here, the trailblazing model reflects on her incredible life

Of all the words you might choose to describe Iman, “average” is about the last. But this, she insists, is the case: “There are beauties in my country. I swear I am not making it up. I am average!” she says, beaming. “Trust me – in Somalia, I am not considered beautiful.”

For that matter, she doesn’t consider herself a supermodel either. “If we’re honest, the supermodels were Naomi, Linda, Christy, Cindy – that group. After that,” she shrugs. “It’s models.”

Of course, Iman is anything but just a model. This is a woman who blazed a trail for black beauty in a fashion industry beholden to white, Western standards. Muse to everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Thierry Mugler to Gianni Versace. But while Iman may be self-deprecating, she is certainly not self-doubting. Rather, this is someone entirely secure in herself: “My mum would always say: ‘Know your worth and walk away from anything that doesn’t serve you’…You could say to me ‘you’re not beautiful’ and I might believe it. But you could never say to me I wasn’t worth it.”

Unshakeable self-worth is baked into Iman’s story.

Discovered by photographer Peter Beard while walking down a Nairobi street in 1975 (not, as is sometimes recounted, a goat-herder who spoke no English but a multilingual political science student), she only agreed to pose for him for the Dhs29,000 she needed to pay her university fees. When she began working in the United States and discovered that black models were paid less than their white peers, she demanded the pay disparity be addressed: “I said to my agent, unless you tell them to pay me the same, I’m not working. I don’t need to do this job.” It took three months for clients to conclude that Iman was more than worth it and pay her what she deserved. Soon, she was one of the most famous women on the planet.

Now 68, she has been in the public eye for almost five decades, her superstardom matched by that of her husband David Bowie, to whom she was married until his death from liver cancer in 2016. The couple were introduced in 1990 on a blind date in Los Angeles by David’s hairdresser. “David said that it was love at first sight,” she says. “For me, I was not willing to get into a relationship, especially with a musician. Absolutely it was a no-no. I had a little girl, Zulekha [from her first marriage to basketball player Spencer Haywood], I had no intentions of starting that. But he wooed me like a true gentleman.” They married in 1992 and their daughter, Alexandria ‘Lexi’ Zahra Jones was born in 2000.

Hearing Iman talk about her husband, there is no doubt that theirs was – and is – a great love story. She often refers to him in the present tense, and firmly believes they were meant to be. “There was no reason for me to be in LA. I hated LA! I think my destiny was telling me: ‘Go. Something is there for you’.”

Our interview is in February and Iman is relieved that January is over: “We are bombarded by David’s birthday and passing that are two days apart… January feels like a whole year on its own.” She spent the anniversary alone at a spa after calling her children and three young grandchildren on whom she unapologetically dotes: “I’ve never understood when people say about children: ‘don’t spoil them’. For god’s sake, spoil them! That’s the only time in your life you’re gonna get spoiled.” But she also recently began a new anniversary tradition – making charcoal drawings: “My intention is that by the end of my life, I will have a stack of January 10th [drawings]. They’re usually just about me and David, just lines of lovers.” David, she says, would be “shocked” at her newly discovered artistic streak. “And he would be proud. My daughter is a painter and he was a painter. I couldn’t do a stick figure! He would be pleasantly surprised.”

Iman is speaking from New York, although not the Soho apartment she shared with David. She has recently moved to the Upper West Side: “It’s lovely! I walk in the park with the dog”. She and David made the city their home when they realise they could live “in plain sight. If you knew where the paparazzi were and you avoided those places, you could have a completely quiet life,” she says. “When people say ‘they were following me’… no way! Sorry, you’re courting them.” After David’s death though, when fans descended on the apartment building to pay their respects, Iman relocated to Santa Monica with Lexi: “I orchestrated it so she was not reminded on a daily basis that her father passed away by fans and photographers. To them, he is David Bowie. To her, he is just daddy.”

It took some time though for Iman to process her own grief.

She avoided the upstate Catskills home that she and David had built together, unable to bear more than two days surrounded by painful memories. But in early 2020, she was forced to confront her feelings, stuck at the house as Covid-19 shut the country down: “Grief came knocking at the door and sat with me for a while.” She found the time to herself “cathartic” and currently sees herself in a period of transition. It is 35 years since she retired from modelling and she hasn’t been to a fashion show since. “Every year the designers ask me: ‘Would you consider doing my runway? Would you consider coming to the show?’ Both cases are a no. I really don’t intend to ever step on the runway ever again. There is no reason for me – I’ve done that bit. You leave and a new crew comes in.”

She may not be sentimental, she is still deeply reverential of fashion, recalling her heyday with fondness: “You had to create some kind of persona to wear these outrageous outfits. For Jean Paul Gaultier, it was pushing the proportions of femininity. Claude Montana was extreme shoulder pads – we rivalled the football players! And Thierry Mugler was like an old Hollywood era. Theatre at its best.” Despite this experience, she confesses that even she would struggle to wear some of her husband’s signature looks: “His genius is that he commits to it. In fashion, that’s what it is – it’s not that you’re wearing an outfit. It’s that you’re committed to it. Then it becomes part of you… I couldn’t pull it off. It’s the audacity. I don’t have that.”

That said, Iman evidently still loves fashion.

She raves about the bold shapes of Sabato de Sarno’s debut collection for Gucci that she is wearing in our cover shoot: “it was very interesting to create something where you become a sculpture.” And she is enamoured with Harris Reed, who dressed her for the 2021 Met Gala in a spectacular gold feathered look – “It was an alchemy because he brought some African things to it but futuristic at the same time… He is the new couture.” Her current focus though is her first fragrance Love Memoir, launched in 2022 as a tribute to her late husband. Its ingredients include vetiver, the scent David wore and which Iman has worn every day since his death (along with a “David” necklace made by the couple’s friend, Hedi Slimane). She considers the perfume the “closest thing [she] could think of to writing a memoir.” Although she is too private for a tell-all autobiography, there are still two things she wants people to know: “that I’m Muslim and I am a refugee.” Indeed, her extraordinary life story would be more than worthy of a book.

Her Somali family moved to Saudi Arabia when her father was made an ambassador there but with no schools for girls, Iman was sent to boarding school in Egypt. She still feels a strong connection to the country and Lexi is named after Alexandria, a city she loves. After political unrest in their home country, the family returned only to flee to Kenya in 1972. Overnight, Iman went from diplomat’s daughter to refugee. While her parents travelled to Tanzania, she stayed in Nairobi and it is not lost on her what a vulnerable position she was in: “I was lucky. I had people on the ground [NGO workers] who are, I believe, like angels who walk among us…I was just 16 years old and I was on my own… My trajectory would be completely different if those people weren’t there… That is why, whenever I see a refugee person – especially a young girl – I always think, by the grace of God, there I go.”

Spirituality is important to Iman – she is not a practising Muslim but “truly, truly a Muslim by faith”.

She was born Zahra Mohamed Abdulmajid but her grandfather bestowed the name Iman upon her: “I came from a family of lots of sons [Iman] means to have faith in God that a daughter shall arrive. I was that daughter.” But despite being one of the rarefied group of people known globally by a singular moniker, it is actually Iman’s surname that means most to her. When she arrived in America, she realised her name meant she “was always looked at with suspicion” but was determined not to assimilate. “I never wanted to change my accent and I never wanted to change my last name. Even when I got married, I would never become Iman Bowie or Iman Jones [Bowie’s real surname]. No, it’s Iman Abdulmajid… It is a point of pride.”

Moving to America also brought Iman a new awareness of “how you can be othered. In Somalia, I never considered myself as ‘a black woman’,” she says. “There was no reason to. I come from a whole country of black people.” But in New York, she found herself constantly defined as ‘Iman: black model.’ In many ways, her very existence in the public eye was revolutionary. Her exquisite face on the world’s biggest magazine covers was earth-shattering for black female representation but Iman was and is so much more than an image: ever since those first pay negotiations, she has also been a powerful voice. In 1994, she founded Iman Cosmetics, inspired by her experiences of having to mix her own foundation shades on photoshoots. In 2013, she formed the Diversity Coalition with friends Bethann Hardison and Naomi Campbell, calling out their industry for the dearth of black models on catwalks. Such was her impact that an entire episode of the 2022 YouTube documentary Supreme Models, tracking the history of black models, was dedicated to her.

Today she believes the industry is changing but that change did not “happen nicely,” taking the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement for the industry to take notice…

“We were sheltered at home [in the pandemic]…There was no way to not look. There was no place to hide. You couldn’t ignore it.” For her, progress comes by way of opportunity: “Nobody is asking for quotas. It’s being given a chance to showcase what you can do… A lot of the black designers were not given chances in magazines and editors would not go to their shows. Now, wow, we have an exemplary group of designers, like Christopher John Rogers and LaQuan Smith, that have been given the light to showcase their clothes.” More than anyone, Iman understands what it means to be given a chance, crediting “the alchemy of the universe” for the direction her life has taken although that does not quite account for what she did with the chance she was given nor the seismic impact of her pioneering work.

But however much she may gamely scoff at her so-called “legendary” status, or quip about being “average,” she does concede that she hopes her legacy will be that she “had a small imprint on what black beauty is considered. That I was part of it, that I was foundational in that.” Undoubtedly, she was, and still is. She may consider herself average but history will not.

Acting Editor: Natasha Faruque. Photographer: AB+DM at The Only Agency. Stylist: Ayumi Perry at Opus Beauty. Hair: Hos Hounkpatin at The Wall Group. Make-Up: Keita Moore at The Only Agency. Manicurist: Mo Qin at The Wall Group. Tailor: Shirlee Idzakovich. Production: Alexey Galetskiy. Senior Producer: Steff Hawker. Styling Assistant’s: Ayana Hipps, Isaiah Blest, Rowaine Grant and Nelly McKay. Words By Rachael Sigee

From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s March 2024 issue.