Iman Inspiring Woman

Iman

Retired model and business executive Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid was born on July 25, 1955, in Mogadishu, Somalia. Iman is sometimes described as her native land’s most famous export.

By 1973, Iman was 18 and a student of political science at the University of Nairobi. She also worked as a translator to help pay her tuition costs. Photographer Peter Beard, a well-known figure in the fashion world, saw her one day on a street in Nairobi and was captivated by her long neck, high forehead and gamine grace. He began following her, and finally approached her to ask if she had ever been photographed. “The first thing I thought was he wanted me for prostitution of naked pictures,” Iman recalled laughingly about that day in an interview with Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service writer Roy H. Campbell. “I had never seen Vogue. I didn’t read fashion magazines, I read Time and Newsweek. ” But when Beard offered to pay her, she reconsidered, and asked for the amount due to the college for her tuition, $8,000; Beard agreed.

One of the most sought-after fashion models of the 1970s and 1980s, Iman became a successful business executive in the 1990s with her own line of cosmetics. Married to rock star David Bowie since 1992, she became a mother for the second time at the age of 44 in the summer of 2000, but it was just one of many boundaries the enigmatic entrepreneur and social activist has broken in her lifetime. “She broadened the definition of beauty,” declared Washington Post writer Robin Givhan of Iman’s stunning, exotic looks. “She made earthiness sensual. She helped to transform fashion into entertainment and models into personalities.”