She has been redefining the fashion and beauty industries since the ’70s, and her iconic, city-sleek style makes her the perfect model for chic urban summer pieces. IMAN talks to SASHA FRERE-JONES about breaking the mold, keeping her poise and being married to David Bowie.
In an idling town car, I am expecting a long wait for Iman but, like a dream, she soon jumps into the car. She is alone – no assistant and no entourage. She greets me warmly and puts her hand on the driver's shoulder. "We're going downtown. I'll need you to wait one hour, then we're going nearby to my house. I'll pay whatever your hourly rate is. Is that OK?" The driver is disarmed by her directness and respectful tone. He agrees, and we drive.
Supermodel Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid is a Somali woman who began her extraordinary career on a myth. "[Photographer] Peter Beard claimed that I was 'wandering around the savannah with goats', which was nonsense," she says, as we arrive for tea at New York's Crosby Street Hotel. But Iman didn't mind. "It was a good story and Peter is a good friend, though I knew it would fall apart the minute anyone met me."
The daughter of a gynecologist and the Somali ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Iman speaks five languages and is no more a goat herder than you or I. The Somalian military coup in 1969 did render her family refugees, but that was followed by their move to America and the beginning of Iman's modeling career in the '70s. For one with an amazing life story, Iman tells it rarely. She is extremely private, a celebrity model who cannot be shoehorned into any of the templates that exist, ready-made, for today's models. And just for good measure, she adds, "I'm not a model any more. I'm just me. I'm not working in front of a camera."
Iman has been quietly married for 21 years to David Bowie, with whom she has a 12-year-old daughter, Alexandria Zahra (both have children from previous marriages). She has her own style website, Destination Iman, and a beauty line for women of color, IMAN Cosmetics, which started in 1994 and has discreetly become a $25million company. Nearing 60, she has become more successful than she ever predicted, and yet has done it with so little drama that it is easy to take her for granted. But on the day we meet, Iman is not keeping the cab meter running for a business meeting, but because her daughter is having a sleepover, and she needs to get home to prepare. This is what spurs her.
Iman is The Edit's perfect summer-in-the-city photoshoot muse. She also wears her own city-classic pieces as we talk: a Burberry raincoat; a J.Crew sweater; a Vince T-shirt; Theory pants; Lanvin ballet flats, teamed with a Chanel bag, all in black. Her hair is curled with hints of blond. She sits upright and carefully sips her tea. If there is an exact mean between social distance and intimacy, Iman lives it. She doesn't emit a lack of emotion but a lack of desire to impress. "The quiet part of it is intentional, because first of all I'm going to be 58 in July," she says. "I wouldn't lie about that, especially as a woman. So it has been a long career. Both David and I stay out of the celebrity thing. That's why we gravitated towards each other, because we really feel that the personal should be separate from the professional. I've never had any members of the press in my home. Oprah [Winfrey] tried to photograph my closet. I said, 'But it's in the apartment and nobody steps in there.'"
I ask if being a person of color affects her decisions to be more or less visible, part of the mantle of being a 'role model'. "I think it is easier for people to understand successful people of color now. It's very mainstream; it's not unusual. I'm not constantly in the papers but I think that works for me. It's given me longevity," she says. What further frustrates the expected narrative is the normality of her life, despite her being married to one of the most famous living rock stars. The couple avoid the glare of the media, living in New York. "I still take my little girl to school," Iman says. "David picks her up. It's easier than any place we've ever lived. People are too cool to bother you."
Because of current – unsubstantiated – rumors about Bowie and his health, I am wary of asking questions about their life together. On the other hand, he has just released a critically acclaimed album and been the subject of a major retrospective at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Iman's comments remain at ground level, resolutely concrete. (She famously said: "I married David Jones – I've never met David Bowie.") "He's very good for everyone, including me and the little one, because there is nothing he's not curious about. He reads every day for hours. We get daily deliveries from Amazon, and he also reads on his Kindle." Don't the delivery guys recognize the name 'David Jones'? "It's not even Jones, it's something else," she says, smiling widely. "He'll say, 'You've got to read this', and I'll say, 'But you've just given me five books that I haven't read yet!'"
Everybody always wants to know if the couple wear each other's clothes, because Bowie apparently was able to swap clothes with his first wife, Angie, in the '70s. "Absolutely no, no. I can't fit in his clothes; I don't have a boy's body. I wasn't built that way," says Iman.
Iman's astonishing build (she is 5ft 9in) was part of how she was able to move through the rise of the supermodels in the '80s and come out the other side. "There is no rule of thumb, really. A lot of the models that became very successful, from Linda Evangelista to Cindy Crawford, worked for years and didn't get anywhere until [they were discovered]," she says. "Even now, Joan Smalls [a recent cover star of The Edit] was doing catalogs for years. I never advise, and I definitely will not encourage my daughter to do it."
When I ask Iman about her time as a judge on TV's The Fashion Show from 2009-2011, she shakes her head and leans back. "There's only one designer who has ever come out of [that show] and has been able to create. They're casting the characters of how they would play in a Greek drama – they want to have those situations," she says. Was that hard to handle? "I had huge fights with the producers. There was somebody I wanted to get rid of because their collection wasn't good. They'd say, 'Well, no, we'd like to keep that person for one more episode.' I wonder if it is dangerous territory to broach the subject of cosmetic surgery. Iman laughs and says, "I got lucky. I broke my foot, and it was not healing well. So since last summer, I've put on 12 pounds. I'm the heaviest I've ever been. So when The Edit first approached me, I said no. But then I talked to a friend, who said, 'It's NET-A-PORTER! They can give you clothes in your size!'
"My natural weight is 130 pounds and I'm 142 now. I was 160 when I was pregnant, so it's a little too much for me. Still, I call it natural Botox. I look at myself in the mirror and I've never looked younger. It's the weight I have put on," she says. "In the west, we have become accustomed to needing to lose weight, right? But as we get older, for women especially, it makes us look a little haggard. So my consolation about this weight is that it's given me a fresh face. The rest of it, I'm sitting on it."
And then, with a polite goodbye, she's no longer sitting on it – she is off to prepare for a sleepover.
