Iman Abdulmajid went from a refugee to a college student to one of the world’s most sought-after models in the span of three years. It sounds like the plot of a fashion fairy tale, but for the Somali-born model turned cosmetics mogul—known simply as Iman—the trajectory was very much real. “That was my destiny,” she says, her voice filled with palpable warmth and nostalgia.
Iman’s ascent to the upper echelons of fashion as well as her subsequent efforts to champion Black models are among the stories highlighted in the newly released six-part YouTube series Supreme Models. Both Iman and Marcellas Reynolds—the latter of whom wrote the book the series is based on—are executive producers. “Iman occupied this space that sort of rose above not just other Black models but rose above white models,” Reynolds says in episode two. The sentiment is shared by others in the series, with British Vogue editor in chief Edward Enninful noting Iman’s “majestic” appeal and longtime casting director James Scully describing her as “a zenith” on the runway.
Since launching her modeling career in 1975, Iman has built one of the industry’s most prolific portfolios. She’s appeared on five Vogue covers and been photographed by greats like Irving Penn, Herb Ritts, and Richard Avedon; both Yves Saint Laurent and Gianni Versace tapped her as a muse; her runway appearances include walks for Halston, Givenchy, and Chanel; and when she retired from from modeling in 1989, she went on to launch the wildly successful Iman Cosmetics. Outside of fashion and beauty, Iman has committed herself to various humanitarian and philanthropic efforts, becoming the first-ever global ambassador for emergency relief organization CARE and supporting the fight against HIV/AIDS alongside her husband, David Bowie.
Though currently recovering from a broken wrist (“I fell off my flats—I wasn’t even wearing heels!” she says of the hiking injury), Iman was in high spirits when she sat down for Glamour’s latest installment of Icons Only. Ahead, the legendary model walks us through her storied life and career, touching on everything from her first photo shoot to becoming a grandmother.
Glamour: You’re from Somalia and went to boarding school in Egypt.
Iman Abdulmajid: Yes, I was born in Somalia and then around 10 or 11, my father became an ambassador to Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia they didn't have schools for girls, so I was sent to a boarding school in Egypt so that I could continue my education. That's where I learned Arabic.
What was it like for you, being away from home so young?
It was awful because I couldn't understand why my brothers were home and I was in a boarding school. I really hated my mom for years for that. I’d never forgiven her. But then I found out in my 20s that she sold all her jewelry so my family could afford to send me to the best school for girls, and that was the boarding school. I would say that if it wasn't for what she did, I wouldn't be where I am now.
Mind you, Somalia is a Muslim country and the boarding school was run by nuns. There was no religious education; there was no way that they would teach us Catholicism because we were Muslims. But it was weird to be with these nuns who were going to church and kneeling down for Jesus Christ, and then we [the students] were Muslims, praying five times a day. For a young person, it was weird having one foot here and one foot there.
Growing up, what did you envision for yourself as an adult? What did you think you’d do, and where did you think you’d live?
My father was a diplomat and I am my father's daughter. I'm very close to him, so I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I wanted to become, not necessarily a politician, but part and parcel of the politics of building Somalia, my country, up.
When you were a teenager, your family left Somalia. What do you remember from that time?
My parents decided in 1972 that we were going to leave the country because a military regime took over and they closed all the embassies. There were people being assassinated and put in jail, and my mom thought that was going to happen to my father. So in the middle of the night we got into a van with just the clothes on our backs, went to the border of Kenya, and by foot, we crossed Somalia's border to Kenya and became refugees.
So you and your family essentially started all over.
You start all over. So here’s the juxtaposition: Before 1972, whenever I went home to Saudi Arabia, where my father was an ambassador, we were driven by chauffeurs and had a great house. And then all of a sudden we’re refugees and have nothing.
It’s unimaginable for a lot of people. Eventually your family settled in Kenya, and you were studying at the University of Nairobi when you met a photographer and life started to change pretty drastically.
Yes. His name was Peter Beard; may he rest in peace. He passed away a couple of years ago. He stopped me in the street.
What was that encounter like?
I had two jobs at the time. I got to Nairobi, and the nongovernment organizations, the NGOs, really took care of me. I'll be forever grateful to those people who are on the ground, who help refugees resettle. They were extremely protective because they knew that as a young girl I could be trafficked, I could be sexually assaulted—anything could happen to me. I told them that I wanted to major in political science and they helped me get into the University of Nairobi. As a refugee, I got one year of free tuition. After that, I had to pay for it myself. And they found jobs for me. I was waitressing in this very popular hotel restaurant and I was translating safari and travel brochures from English to Italian.
One day while I was going from one job to the other, Peter Beard stopped me in the street and said, “Have you ever been photographed?” The first thing that came to me is “Oh, here we go, white people thinking we've never seen a camera in our lives.” And I said, “Of course.” As I proceeded to walk, he followed me and asked, “By whom?” And I replied, “My parents.” He said, “No, no, no, I meant professionally.” I had no idea what he was talking about. I'm still walking, and he's still following me. Then he said, “Listen, if I can take pictures of you, I'll pay you.” That was a foreign thing to me because I'd never seen fashion magazines; I’d never worn heels or makeup. I was like, “What kind of pictures?” I was thinking about my brother's Playboy. He said, “No, I just want to take pictures of your face.” And I asked, “Well, how much will you pay me?” He said, “How much do you want?” I said, “$8,000.” That was the yearly tuition for the university. And then he said, “Yes.” He took pictures of me, paid for the tuition, and I thought that was the end of that and I'd never see him again.
A couple weeks later, he called my friend at her office and said, “Please tell Iman to come to your office because we need to talk to her.” I went and Wilhelmina [Cooper] from the Wilhelmina Agency and Peter called me on the phone. Wilhelmina was telling me that I could be a model, and I said, “Okay, I'd like to come to New York.” I was barely 18, but even at that young age, I said, “I want a round-trip ticket so I can always come back home if things don't work out.” I still have the ticket. I can't use it anymore. It's so old.
You came to New York and your first shoot was with Vogue, so you started off pretty strong.
Yeah, I started pretty strong. It was like my third day in New York. But that day could have been the last day I worked.
What happened?
It was very important in the trajectory of my life. I walked into that studio and the shoot was with Vogue photographer Arthur Elgort. There were two models, me and a Caucasian model. The makeup artist started doing the Caucasian model's makeup, and I was just looking because I'd never seen that before. When he came to do my makeup, he asked me a very perplexing question. I say perplexing because it was not lost on me that he didn't ask the other model. He said, “Did you bring your own foundation?” I had no idea what he was talking about, so I said no. He proceeded to mix some products and put them on my face; when he was done and I looked in the mirror, I looked gray.
If those pictures were in color, they probably would not have used them. Thank God they were in black-and-white. But that day I went to every store—all the department stores, Woolworth’s, everywhere—and started collecting products that looked a little bit like my skin tone and started mixing and matching. I started putting them on my face and taking Polaroids. Just from that sitting, I understood what was wrong and what could immediately disrupt my career before it even began. I knew that my image was my currency, and that if I didn't protect it, it would be abused and in somebody else's hands. I had to have some say in how my images were portrayed. I could tell an unprepared makeup artist, “No, this is wrong for me.” When I was growing up in Somalia, my mom instilled in me, “Know your worth and know when to walk away from anything that doesn't serve you well. A man, careers, whatever it is—know when it is not serving you and walk away from it.”
Being a model appears to be the epitome of glamour. You’re wearing beautiful clothes, you’re walking on runways, you’re traveling the world. Was that your experience? Especially having gone from studying to being a diplomat to modeling in New York City.
First of all, my parents were very disappointed in me until I was able to make enough money to ensure that my brothers and sisters, who were at risk of not finishing their schooling, could complete their education. I was able to pay for it. But my parents were like, “What is this? You were majoring in political science. What is this thing that you’re doing?” It was not a step up. It was a step down in an African family. [Laughs.]
But the life of a Black model is twice as hard as that of a Caucasian model. We work more jobs, we travel to more spaces, we get more nos than yeses—even for me, who started in Vogue. It doesn't matter; it doesn't change what the culture is. When I came to the United States, I found out that there was a discrepancy in pay with Black models and white models,. They were paying less money to Black models for the same job. So I talked to Wilhelmina and said to her, “First of all, you know this is a racist act, but let me put it to you from a different perspective: What I want is pay for services rendered. If I'm doing the same job as this person, I want the same pay.” It was not the status quo, and for three months I sat it out until the first client came in and paid the same amount. But it took me three months.
You just didn’t work those three months?
What did my mom say? "Walk away from it. It's not serving you well."
Right.
If I had agreed to it, then that's what they were going to pay me from then on. I wish I could say I was thinking for the larger culture or for Black models, but I was barely 19. I wasn't thinking that. I was just thinking, “I'm not going to do this.” I found out that, afterward, all Black models were paid the same amount of money. When you’re young, you don't always understand that you're making a change; the ripple effect comes later. People say, “I'm so glad you did that because now we can get paid.” And then you think, What? I did that for everybody?
What was life like once your career started to take off, in the late ’70s into the ’80s?
I always describe doing fashion shows, especially in Europe and particularly in Paris, as running away with the circus. They used to build tents in the Tuileries. So the tent goes up, the fashion shows happen, and then the tents go down and the circus moves to another city. It's a very tight group of people that travel together, eat together, and they become part of a family.
But as glamorous as it was, it was also very, very, very hard work. In Europe especially, nobody had a sense of time. You’d have fittings at 2 a.m., 3 a.m.; you start shows at 8 a.m. You walk, you’ve barely slept, and all you want is breakfast. And breakfast is coffee and Champagne—that's what we started with.
There were a lot of really young girls—14, 15, 16—and they were on the road unaccompanied. It was rather dangerous. It wasn’t always as glamorous as it looked, but there were definitely glamorous parts of it. There were designers who adored Black models at the time, like Saint Laurent and Givenchy. Sixty percent of their models on the runway were Black. You were treated like a queen. So there was always a juxtaposition of this lifestyle that is all glamour and glitter, but at the same time, the grittiness was always there underneath all of that.
Are there any moments that really stick out to you from that time?
One was when Yves Saint Laurent asked me to be the muse for his couture collection. I believe it was ’79. I didn't know what it meant, but I immediately said yes. I got there and there were no other models; it was just me. They gave me a white robe, black sheer stockings with the seams at the back, and black stiletto pumps—patent, shiny. Then they walked me into his atelier. The ceilings were so high and gilded gold.
Saint Laurent was a fragile man, so everybody talked in a hushed voice. I thought that I was going to be trying on clothes; no, none of the clothes were done. There were bolts of fabric and I had to stand there while he draped and cut them. The mastery of someone cutting a couture dress around your body, there's nothing like it. That’s one experience that I will always cherish. I don't want to duplicate it because I was on my feet in pumps all day, but everything was cut on my body. When he finished, he called the collection African Queen and I did the ads with David Bailey. It was a dream come true.
Earlier you spoke about your image being your currency. Were you comfortable with the intense attention on your looks that came with being a model? Did you always feel as beautiful as the industry and the people around you were telling you you were?
No. Somalis still say, "If Iman can become a model, the whole Somali people can become models.” [Laughs.] Everybody's beautiful; everybody looks like me.
I went to a high school where you had to be a double-, triple-A student to get in. There were 450 boys and 32 girls. When we finished, there was a big dance party. I didn't have one date, not one! To make it worse, to add insult to injury, my father had to pay my cousin to take me to the party.
No way.
I found this out in my 20s as I became a top model, and I still cried over it. [Laughs.] So no, I come from a country where everyone looks like me. I was not that special. I just happened to end up meeting Peter Beard. What I had was the stamina for the business. You don't survive from 1975 to now by just pretending it's all hair and makeup. It takes more than that. It takes stamina and professionalism and understanding your business quite well.
I think you can add talent to that list too.
Yeah. At 67, there is definitely talent too.
Let’s talk about some of your work outside of modeling. I was just watching a clip of you guest-starring on Miami Vice.
Oh my God, yes. I could have become an actress if I followed it through!
I thought the clip was so funny because it's a scene where your character, Lois, is on a date with Crockett [Don Johnson] and she says: “Unabashed self-promotion, it’s just not my style. All this business of ‘Hi, I’m Lois, date me, please, please.’ I just never thought I’d end up in a video dating service.” The two go on to discuss how video dating beats flirting with someone at the grocery store. This was in 1988. Fast-forward to today, and online dating is very popular.
I was just talking to a friend of mine the other day about online dating. I haven't had one friend that has been lucky in that department. I would never consider it because for me, I've met the love of my life. I'm done. I'm good.
So no online dating for you?
No dating, period. [Laughs.] Forget about online dating.
Did you enjoy acting?
[In Miami Vice] I played a weird, crazy character who was out of her mind. That was easy because you can pretend to be somebody else. If I actually kept it up, because I got such great reviews, I maybe could have become an actress. But it was not my destiny.
You had a role in the film Out of Africa too.
Yes. I wanted to portray [Mariammo] because it's a true story. She had an affair with a white man, but they could not speak of it or acknowledge it. The only time that she was acknowledged was by his grave when he died. Not even by the grave—she had to be outside. I just wanted to tell that story.
After you retired from modeling, you launched Iman Cosmetics. How did that venture come about?
The seed was planted in me those first weeks in New York. I started making a batch of makeup for myself, and I would take it to all my shoots and fashion shows. Every model knew that I had a batch of foundation, so they would always come to me and say, “Can I use your...” and I'd just pass it along.
When I was retiring from modeling in 1989, it was like, “Okay, so what's my next act? What do I want to do next?” Makeup was still at the forefront. Now, it's not like I did it first. There was Naomi Sims and Fashion Fair before Iman Cosmetics. But everything in the industry was Black and white, and there was nothing in between. What I wanted to create at that time, in 1994, was how I saw the world, especially in music and particularly in hip-hop. People from Timbuktu to Hong Kong were listening to the same music and dressing the same way. There was a new language of multiculturalism, and I wanted to capture that in beauty.
The minute you say “women of color” people think, That is only for Black women. I changed it to “women with skin of color.” I was interested in the spectrum of skin tones, from Middle Eastern to Latina to Native American to Asian to Black.
How did you go about building the brand?
Every partner and investor I talked to asked, “Why don't you just do this for Black women?” And I'd say, “It already exists. It's called Fashion Fair. This is a new generation of people I'm trying to talk to. It's a new beauty language that I'm trying to convey.” That was difficult. And then, being a model, people don't take you seriously or think you know what you're talking about. I tried to tell them, “I am the customer, and I'm a customer with money. If this existed in Yves Saint Laurent or Givenchy or Chanel, I have the money to buy it. But it doesn't exist, so I want to create it.” J.C. Penney came on board, financed the company, and gave me 400 doors to start with.
Outside of your career, you’re also a mother…
And a grandmother. I have three grandchildren.
What has your experience as a mother, and now grandmother, been like?
It's much easier to be a grandmother than a mom. As a mother, all is on you. Grandma, you just have the good days and then you give them back. So it's lovely. It is really nice.
My oldest daughter, Zulekha, I had her in my early 20s, so I was still working and I took her all over with me until she had to start school and couldn’t travel with me anymore. It was hard in that way—you feel guilty. I think mothers always feel guilty, especially working mothers. There's things that we miss. With my younger daughter, I had the luxury to be at home all the time. I had her at 45. All that work was out of my way and I could do better the second time around.
I will say, as someone who had a working mom, I don’t doubt that you felt very guilty, but I was so proud of my mother. I’m so glad that I had that example of her being in her office and being a boss and working.
Yeah, that’s nice, because you actually see what's great about a mom—that she can work and then be switched off and be sweet and playful with you. That she can wear those two hats.
You’re featured in the book Supreme Models: Iconic Black Women Who Revolutionized Fashion and signed on as an executive producer of the YouTube series. How did that come about?
One of the directors, Marcellas Reynols, who wrote the book, approached me. It was supposed to be four-part, but YouTube said it could be six. I had a Zoom call with the directors during COVID where they told me about the premise, and I said, “I know this, because I lived through it.” The first thing I asked was “What are you guys bringing to the table that has not been said?” And they said, “Well, there has never been a documentary on Black models.” I was surprised by that. We're talking about 2021. I was like, “That can't be true.” They said, “No, it doesn't exist. This will be the first one.” That brought me on board.
I wanted to make sure that the models spoke for themselves. I didn't want a designer talking for Iman. I wanted to tell my story, and I wanted each model to be able to tell their story—the trials and tribulations of Black models, what they’ve been through. And of course, footage of them on the runway and all of that.
Your good friend and fellow former model Bethann Hardison is also featured in the book and series. How did you two meet?
I met Bethann my first week in New York, and she was the kindest person for me to meet. At the time, everybody had heard something about me—either I was a goat herder or I was a princess. Bethann was working as an assistant with Stephen Burrows and he asked me to come see him and try on some clothes. I went in there and there were some models around and they all thought I didn't speak English. I pretended I didn't so I could hear what everybody was saying about me. I put on a dress and one heel on, and for the life of me, I could not put on the other heel. I was shaking. Bethann got on her knees to the uproar of the whole room: “Don't do that because she will be demanding that everybody bow down to her,” blah, blah, blah. She didn't pay attention to them. She went on her knees and helped me with the shoe. Then she looked up at me and said, “You speak English, don't you? You understand what they're saying?” And I said, “Yes.” We've been friends ever since.
You both have advocated for Black models over the years. Tell us about some of those initiatives.
In the ’90s we started the Black Girl Coalition. It was a celebration of the change of guard, because when I arrived it was all about tokenism—one Black model at a time. A Black model had to dethrone another Black model to just get a space. The whole mentality of divide and conquer didn't apply to white models, but there was only one Black model at a time. When I arrived, it was Beverly Johnson. We became friends, because I don't come from a space where I have to fight another Black person. It was foreign to me the first time somebody described me as a “Black model.” You have no idea how foreign it is when you come from a country that’s 100% Black to be called Black. I'm like, “Well, yeah, I know that.” Do you know what I mean? I've always said, “African, Somali.” I have never said “Black.” It's very obvious to us. I learned very fast being in this country why it’s like that, because it comes from that racial divide. All models should be models. They should be Precious Lee, Joan Smalls, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlingon. Nobody calls Linda and Christy “white models." Why are Naomi and Joan “Black models”?
You two came together again in 2013, along with Naomi Campbell, after the fall shows revealed a startling lack of Black models on the runway.
We grouped together and wrote to the CFDA and the same groups in London, Paris, and Milan to highlight what was going on. A lot of designers felt like they were being called racist, but their actions were racist. They explained that they had been hiring casting agents who would call the modeling agencies and say, “We are not seeing Black models this season,” as if they were a disposable trend.
The change from that dialogue was very fast and visible. We didn’t only talk to the BBCs and CNNs and ABCs, but we also put it on social media. Social media is a different animal. Now people hear it and start highlighting everything that's wrong in the business, putting a light on those dark shadows. Literally, within six months, there was a vast change.
Social media is indeed a different animal. You share a lot of inspirational quotes on your Instagram and some funny memes. A few of your posts seem to suggest that you’re a bit of a homebody. Is that true?
Yes. I am a homebody.
What’s your ideal day at home?
With COVID, I got accustomed to being in my upstate country house, which has the most beautiful sunsets. My dream day is going for a hike, reading a book, talking to some friends, and watching the sunset. Now that everything is open, I'm dying to travel. I'm a nomad by nature because of where I come from, but also, the world is my community. In the past two and a half years, I haven't gone anywhere. What I really want is to travel and have the smell and the touch of different human beings all around the world. It's so important to me. You don't miss something till you can't do it anymore.
Leah Faye Cooper is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair whose work has appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, Time Out New York, and StyleCaster, among numerous other publications.
