TIMELESS BEAUTY: A Chance Virtual Visit with Super Model Iman

One of the joys of living in New York City for many years is the unexpected pleasure of meeting interesting people. I can't remember what year it was, but it was an on-location catering job on a sultering Summer day in the backyard of a townhouse on the Upper East Side.

We immersed bottles of champagne on-ice outdoors in an inflatable child's pool for a birthday celebration.

Life goes on with that memory-trace (no other details. It was private; nothing more being said)

Getting Personal With Iman

The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love

By Guy Trebay Nov. 18, 2021

(Iman at the Polo Bar in Manhattan, wearing Ralph Lauren.

Credit...Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times)

". . .We were seated on a leather banquette at the Polo Bar. Recently liberated from lockdown, Ralph Lauren’s midtown clubhouse for the shiny set is once more booming, though not yet serving lunch.

Never mind that. Learning that Iman would be in Manhattan for a few days to promote her first project since Mr. Bowie’s death — called Love Memoir, it is Iman’s first perfume and was inspired by their nearly quarter-century relationship — Mr. Lauren not only threw open the restaurant’s doors in welcome but dressed her for the occasion in a stock-tied floral print prairie dress, chunky silver belt and calfskin Wellington boots.

“When David and I met, we had both had successful careers and previous relationships,” Iman, 66, said. Born Iman Abdulmajid, Iman was 36 and had long since achieved both fame and mononym status when she and Mr. Bowie, 45 at the time, were married. “We knew what we wanted from each other,” Iman said in the frank way that is her signature.

People may imagine many things about Iman, projecting onto the screen of her beauty an array of fantasies engendered by someone with her natural refinement, aristocratic bearing and a neck so elegantly attenuated she considered it a superpower at fashion casting calls.

In reality Iman is hilarious and bawdy.

As her 800,000 Instagram followers know, she billboards her truth. Her social media posts alternate between glamour shots and typographical renderings of home truths (“We all have chapters that we would rather keep unpublished”) . . .

She swears with abandon and falls easily into conspiratorial laughter with a reporter — that is until the din of a bartender dumping cubes in an ice bin threatens to drown out conversation. The first time it happens, Iman ignores it. Twice and everything around her stops dead.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Iman says, dispatching an associate at a nearby table to bring the velvet hammer down.

Above all, what she and Mr. Bowie wanted, Iman said, was a refuge from a public always greedy for celebrities’ emotional detritus. They were also keen to get away from the psychic clutter of their own mythologies.

[...]

“It was never for me about the fabulousness,” Iman said. “I came to this country as a refugee. My parents started out poor in Somalia, did well for themselves but then lost everything. So when I came to America, it was a way for me to rebuild. It was a business plan.”

Famously, Iman’s career got its start in the ’70s with a risible fiction ginned up by the photographer and inveterate fabulist Peter Beard.

It was Mr. Beard who introduced Iman to Diana Vreeland at Vogue, claiming that his Somali protégé — a diplomat’s daughter educated at boarding schools in Cairo and at Nairobi University — was the daughter of a goatherd he had stumbled across in the African bush.

“I was not ‘lost’ to be discovered in a jungle,” Iman said with a hoot of derision. “I’ve never been in a jungle in my life!”

[...] The notion of creating a perfume evolved gradually and organically during isolation, she said. “I’ve been in the beauty business since 1994, and I never created a perfume.”

Every culture has its rituals of remembrance: lighted candles, altar building, the burning of incense and shedding of possessions. Victorians braided their loved ones’ hair into rings and lockets, and Iman’s perfume is, in a sense, a Victorian mourning gesture. The perfume weaves memories from the life she and Mr. Bowie shared.

[...] Love Memoir, which comes to market this week, is shaped like two stacked stones, one amber glass and the other hammered gold. The fragrance it contains is a heady and, it should be said, faintly anachronistic blend of bergamot, rose and an essence that was Mr. Bowie’s favorite.

“For 20 years I only wore Fracas,” Iman said. Following Mr. Bowie’s death, she found herself instead wearing his scent — a dry, earthy, and faintly woody smell of a common grass native to South Asia known as vetiver.

So it seemed only natural that, when working with the perfumers at Firmenich on the composition of Love Memoir, vetiver would be one of its most powerfully lingering notes. . ."

READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/style/iman-david-bowie.html