Iman Abdulmajid

Iman is a Somali-American fashion model, businesswoman, and humanitarian whose four-decade career has produced multiple defining late-20th-century international high-fashion modeling career — particularly her 1976–1989 high-fashion runway and editorial-photography career as one of the first prominent African fashion models in the international fashion industry. She was born Zara Mohamed Abdulmajid on July 25, 1955, in Mogadishu, Somalia. Her father Mohamed Abdulmajid was a Somali diplomat (the Somali ambassador to Saudi Arabia) and her mother Marian Abdulmajid was a gynecologist. The 1969 Somali coup d'état produced the family's 1972 emigration to Kenya.

Her education at the University of Nairobi (political science, without earning a degree) launched her early-career path. Her 1975 chance encounter with American photographer Peter Beard at the University of Nairobi — and her subsequent late-1975 New York City arrival under Beard's American agency representation — launched her early-career American fashion modeling career. Her January 1976 New York City professional debut for designer Calvin Klein launched her late-1970s American high-fashion career.

Her 1976–1989 international high-fashion modeling career produced multiple defining international fashion-magazine cover appearances — particularly her late-1970s and 1980s Vogue magazine covers (across the American, French, British, and Italian editions of Vogue), her American-and-French-designer-runway collaborations (particularly with Yves Saint Laurent, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Gianni Versace, and Issey Miyake), and her substantial role in the substantial expansion of African-fashion-model representation in 1980s international high-fashion publications.

Her 1992 marriage to English rock musician David Bowie produced her later international public profile. Her 1994 founding of the Iman Cosmetics line — the cosmetics line specifically formulated for the cosmetic-product needs of women of color — produced her late-1990s and 2000s American businesswoman career. The Iman Cosmetics line has continued to shape 2000s and 2010s American multi-ethnic-cosmetics retail. Her January 10, 2016 widowhood following her husband David Bowie's January 10, 2016 cancer-related death shaped her subsequent late-2010s and 2020s public profile.

Her name Iman derives from the Arabic īmān meaning "faith" or "belief." Iman has been climbing in American naming since the 1980s.