Model Iman creates perfume to celebrate David Bowie: ‘Memories link’

The New York Times

You will never enter her room. It probably won’t even go past the front door of your house. For years, people have been trying to deduce exactly where top model Iman, 66, and her husband, David Bowie (1947-2016), had their hideout in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York.

But no one could. Even today, few of Woodstock’s residents know the exact location, though it’s not far from the historic little town that the completely urban Bowie satirized on his first visit in 2002 as “too cute to describe.”

But when, while recording an album at a local studio years later, Bowie came across an advertisement for mountain terrain whose views have changed little since James Fenimore Cooper described the landscape in his books, he noticed something else in that setting: an opportunity for escape from fame.

“David and I are always too protective of our privacy,” Iman told me one afternoon in mid-October. “There were things that no one else would be allowed to see,” explained the woman who, like her husband, spent most of her life under a microscope. “Our house, our bedroom, our daughter have always been off-limits.”

When you make an exception for a [publicação], “you can’t say no to others,” she said, talking about magazines that have indeed highlighted the decor of several of the Bowies’ homes in their pages — if only after the singer-songwriter, a shrewd businessman, had put them up for sale and moved.

We were tucked into a leather-seat booth at the Polo Bar. Recently released from lockdown, Ralph Lauren’s club for the brightest of New Yorkers was in full swing, though it wasn’t serving lunch yet.

But that’s not very important. Upon discovering that Iman would be in Manhattan for a few days to promote her first project since Bowie’s death — a perfume called Love Memoir, the first fragrance she conceived, inspired by their nearly 25-year relationship — Lauren didn’t. he only opened the doors of his restaurant to welcome her but created the look she wore for the occasion, a floral dress accompanied by a thick silver belt and kid wellington boots.

“When David and I first met, we both had successful careers, and we’d both gone through prior relationships,” said Iman. Born Iman Adbulmajid, she was 36 years old and had earned her fame and the right to be recognized by her first name only a long time ago when she and Bowie, who was then 45, got married.

“We knew what we wanted from each other,” Iman said in the blunt way that has become his hallmark. People can imagine many things about Iman, projecting onto the canvas of her beauty a set of fantasies engendered by her natural refinement, aristocratic bearing, and a neck so elegant and well shaped that she considered him almost a superpower in casting selections for fashion shows in her period as a model.

In fact, Iman is hilarious, and his humor has an obscene side. As her 800,000 Instagram followers know, she doesn’t hesitate to express her truths. Her posts on social media alternate between glamorous photos and homely truths expressed in a succinct style (“we all have chapters we’d like to remain unpublished”), which, because they were posted by her, look less like a refrigerator magnet. .

She’s extremely foulmouthed and shares conspiratorial laughs easily with the reporter — at least until the noise of a bartender dropping ice cubes into a bucket threatens to shut down all conversation.

The first time this happens, Iman ignores the fact. From the second, everything seems to freeze instantly around you. “Oh, no, no, no, no,” says Iman, dispatching a subordinate at the next table to close the matter with gruff politeness.

Most of all, what she and Bowie wanted was a haven that would protect them from an audience always greedy for the emotional detritus of celebrities. And the two also wanted to keep their distance from the accumulation of psychological residues in their mythologies.

In contrast to his carefully constructed, chameleon-like public persona, his position as a superstar, and his ever-impressive public presence, in private David Bowie was introspective, a devoted self-taught and, according to Iman, an old-fashioned husband so besotted with talent. her household (“I cook really, really, really good grilled chicken”) that the two of them rarely went out to eat in restaurants after they got married.

When the two met, Iman had long since established a highly successful cosmetics brand, Iman Cosmetics, specializing in non-white skin care products. And she’s devoted decades to turning the supposed glamor of a career as a model into a personal fortune.

“I was never interested in being a fabulous person,” said Iman. “I came to this country as a refugee. My parents started out poor in Somalia, they got along well. But then they lost everything. So, coming to the United States was a way for me to rebuild myself. It was a business plan.”

Fabulous, Iman’s career began in the 1970s with laughable fiction invented by photographer, and inveterate fabulist, Peter Beard.

It was Beard who introduced Iman to Diana Vreeland of Vogue magazine, claiming that her Somali protégé — the daughter of a diplomat and educated at private schools in Cairo and the University of Nairobi — was the daughter of a goat herder and that he had found her for chance on a trip to the jungles of Africa.

“I was never lost, to be ‘found’ in the wild,” Iman said with a sarcastic laugh. “I’ve never been in a jungle in my life.” Since their first meeting, Iman said, she and Bowie have recognized something rare and solid in each other.

The immediate emotional connection the musician spoke of in describing this first encounter was reinforced by a shared conviction that they had found kindred spirits in each other, ready to build a partnership far from the celebrity circus.

“I know my identity, and David knew his,” said Iman. “When we met, we came to an agreement about continuing to live a purposeful life.” They’re both willful, and they both had a very intense focus.

“Our focus was on the two of us, what belonged to us, and our daughter,” she said, referring to Alexandria Zahra Jones (Jones was Bowie’s real last name), known as Lexi. “We always protect each other too much.”

To a surprising degree, the couple were able to maintain a more or less normal life. Most of their time they spent hiding in the hustle and bustle of southern Manhattan. “We found the paparazzi around here to be a bit lazy,” she said, unlike London, where a brief house-hunting expedition made them fugitives.

“We were there for a week and were followed every second, from the airport to reboarding the plane. We thought it would be impossible to escape this kind of attention, so we decided it was best to go home and let the paparazzi chase other people “.

Home for them while their daughter attended Little Red Schoolhouse (now LREI), a progressive school in Greenwich Village, was an apartment near the Puck Building in Soho that she recently sold. “I lived alone in that huge place, and it was sadder to be there accompanied by my memories, wandering around the house,” she said.

Over the past decade, and for part of Bowie’s illness (something that was very well hidden from the press), the couple often retreated to their upstate estate. And it was there that Iman returned after Bowie died of liver cancer in 2016. It was only there, in her loneliness, that she was able to begin to process her grief.

“I’d rather not talk to anyone,” said Iman, with the exception of his daughter, her agent, and activist Bethann Hardison, a neighbor and a good friend of the family. Iman walked every day through the woods on his property, enjoying the unspoiled view of the mountains. And unexpectedly began to build dolmens.

In many cultures throughout history, people have piled up stones to mark pathways, enshrine sacred places, or to signify meditation. For Iman, building dolmens has become a daily way of doing all of this, and of organizing his memories.

“For me, the isolation was good because in Manhattan, there was no room to suffer,” she said. Strangers stopped her in the street to express their regret, but then insisted on asking for selfies. “In the woods I could cry, let go of my pain,” she said.

“I started piling up rocks, making a dolmen a day. It helped me find more joy in my memories. And gradually it became less painful for me to see those beautiful sunsets that my husband loved, without thinking about showing it to David.” .

The idea of ​​creating a perfume evolved naturally and organically during isolation, she said. “I’ve been in the beauty business since 1994, and I’ve never created a perfume.” Every culture has its rituals of memory: lighting candles, building altars, burning incense, and ritually destroying possessions.

The Victorians kept braids and curls from the hair of loved ones they had lost, and Iman’s perfume is, in some measure, a Victorian mourning ritual. The perfume is a bond of memories about the life she and Bowie led.

On the package is a watercolor she painted depicting a twilight in upstate New York. “The words inside the glass are words I’ve been writing about love,” she said. Love Memoir, which hits the market this week, has a glass in the form of two piled stones, one in amber glass and the other in gold.

The fragrance is a potent and, say, slightly anachronistic blend of bergamot, roses and an essence that was Bowie’s favorite. “For 20 years or more, I’ve only used Fracas,” said Iman. After Bowie’s death, she found she wanted to use his perfume — a dry, earthy and wood-toned fragrance based on a grassy native to South Asia known as vetiver.

So, when working with Firmenich perfumers to compose the Love Memoir, it seemed completely natural that vetiver was one of the most persistent notes of the new fragrance. “People have asked me if I plan to create another fragrance,” said Iman. “I have no idea, and I have no intention of doing so. For me, it came completely unexpectedly. It was a way of processing my grief and coming to terms with my memories.”