Iman (Kunst)

*****
"There is no routine for beauty. All rules are made to be broken and whatever works this year might not work next year. And the good thing about now is that technology keeps on changing, so you have lots of great products that come into the marketplace... When it comes to plastic surgery, I’m against it. I can say that because I don’t need it yet. But I’ve also seen friends of mine who’ve had it, and it didn’t come off well. All these new procedures—plumpers, whatever they call them—they’re over doing it, starting it too young. If you start picking on yourself when you’re young, when does it stop? Because it only gets worse. I think that the good thing and the bad thing about what we have now for women is that we have choices for how to take care of your skin. Because skin, unlike cosmetics, is an investment in oneself because it is a long road. My mom used to tell me that the skin you take care of in your twenties is the one you’re going to inherit in your sixties. It’s a consistent, consistent, consistent thing. It’s something that you’re doing for yourself, not so people can comment on it.

I turned 57 this summer. The old days where you could lie about your age, it’s all gone. People Google it and they know exactly how old you are. So I thought I’d just get on with it! Say it! [Laughs] But people still always ask me in the street, like young girls in their twenties, ‘Oh, what do you use for foundation?’ ‘What do you use for skincare?’ So I started a blog called Ageless Chic where I talk about that type of thing, my life, and age.

To me, there is no difference between looking 44 and 57. If I am going to lie, I’m going to be in my thirties. [Laughs] It’s not going to be forties, even though people keep on saying, ‘Fifty is the new forty.’ It’s like ‘Thursday is the new Saturday,’ or whatever. [Laughs] It’s very difficult to embrace aging. It just knocks on the door and it’s an unwelcome guest that stinks. You know? I don’t feel the way I look, and I don’t mean inside. People always say, ‘Oh, I still feel 25 inside.’ I don’t mean that; I mean my body feels my age. The outside, my face, has held up—that’s pure genetics. My father is in his 80s and he looks 50, so that’s pure genes. It’s a bitch. I mean, I fractured my foot this summer walking down the street. I didn’t fall or anything. Literally, I went like this and it was fractured. It wasn’t even a high shoe—it was a wedge. The next thing I knew I was at the doctor’s office in the evening. And that only happens when you get old! [Laughs] I said to my doctor, ‘What should I take, vitamins?’ And he said, ‘Don’t fall!’ That’s his advice. It is scary, I think. I have a 12-year-old and she cries when I say I’m old. But I also have a 34-year-old [Zulekha Haywood], who actually works here with me. I think what’s upsetting is the idea that I have a young girl who I might not be around for, god forbid. But that’s the only time I think about it, because I’ve had my time, you know? It’s not like I’m saying, ‘Oh, I wasted my life’ or anything.

The times have changed. The issues my 12-year-old is faced with are totally different than the 34-year-old. The 12-year-old is faced with body issues that the other one didn’t have at the age of twelve. The word ‘fame,’ too. The question is, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ And your kids now say, ‘I want to be famous,’ which is weird. It’s like, famous for what?

My husband and I are very up-front, because we know it’s going to haunt us if we lie. My 12-year-old saw a picture of me that somebody re-tweeted—it was maybe taken in my twenties. And I was holding a cigarette and she goes, ‘You smoked?’ I was like, ‘These things, you’ll find out later…’ [Laughs] I mean, thank god at my time there was no TMZ or anything like that—thank god. There are no pictures of me coming out and staggering or anything like that…. I wouldn’t want to be young nowadays.

In terms of skincare, I wear SPF, which is key because people think that black people don’t need SPF, but SPF is key, key, key, in everything, everyday. I use Patricia Wexler—she has it in her moisturizers. When I hit 40, Patricia said I needed SPF 45 and I said, ‘I’m not white!’ And she said, ‘No, you do.’ So, that’s basically it. I use SPF and then, like we tell our kids, brush you teeth twice a day. The SKII Skin Signature 3-D Refining Mask is good, too. I can have the flu and jet lag, and I put one of these on and people think I just came from the spa. It’s magic, absolutely magic.

I don’t wear makeup unless I have a photo shoot. But of course I know how to do my own makeup—I’m actually better than a lot of makeup artist because makeup artists do lots of people’s faces, I only do mine all the time. In my time, makeup artists didn’t always do it for you. The thing that one cannot learn, but only by practice, is blending. Makeup artists always say, ‘Blend, blend, blend.’ Who the hell knows what that means? But it’s the key to making yourself look like you’re not wearing any makeup. Even in photo shoots, when they want to do something that looks like ‘less makeup,’ that takes longer than full-on drag! [Laughs] Full-on drag takes less than an hour, but flawless, ‘nothing’ makeup? Two-and-a-half hours! They have to blend and make it look like you have nothing on.

I don’t let my 12-year-old wear any makeup. She negotiates lip gloss. I say, ‘Only on the weekend.’ She’ll say, ‘Not even to school?’ And I ask her, ‘Who’s going to look?’ But skincare is important, especially at her age, when you’re getting pimples—it comes with the territory. She’d put makeup on all day if I let her, but if I tell her to wash her face, it’s an argument.

In my brand, Iman Cosmetics, I love our Cover Cream, which I created specifically for people like me. You just put it where you actually think you need it. And it doesn’t have oil, so it’s matte and you don’t have to put powder on it. It’s the one thing that I would wear if I were going out. It’s good for under your eyes if you have some pigmentation, dark circles—you don’t put it all over your face. And of course, mascara. Also, Scott Barnes Body Bling: it’s a cream, but I’ll give you a hint of what this is. Jennifer Lopez before this was just 'Jennifer Lopez.' When she started using this, she became 'J.Lo.' [Laughs] You know that glowy skin? That’s what this does. It makes you sparkly, so it’s good for red carpet, not for real life. On a regular basis, Kiehl's Creme de Corps is the best cream ever. And for fragrance, I like Tom Ford Neroli Portofino—anything from the body oil to the soap to the moisturizer to the eau de parfum. It’s amazing; it feels summery and wintery at the same time.

Being black, there is no 'signature hairstyle.' That’s one thing we play with more than white girls: hair. Curly, straight, it doesn’t matter. It’s changing, everyday. My hair can be different this evening! Actually the only thing I don’t know how to do is my hair; I have a hairdresser. My hair right now is flat-ironed. And if I want it curled, I just wash it and then put in a few pin curls. The color, I’ve been staying with for a couple months, but I’m getting bored already. That’s from my old days of modeling, because you keep on changing, you know? I go darker for fall, when we are wearing leathers and stuff like that—it looks a bit edger when it’s darker. My natural texture is curly—lots of curls. I go there a lot; I love curly. And I swear by Moroccan Oil and the Restorative Hair Mask, which I do weekly. I love Moroccan Oil for me and my daughter—it has enough moisture without being oily.

I don’t trust anyone but my hairdresser. His name is Oscar James, and he works with a lot of women’s hair, from Vanessa Williams to Halle Berry. He’s very well known with African American celebrities, especially. He lives in New York, he comes to my apartment, and I cook dinner for him and that’s my ‘in.’ I feed him! [Laughs] But he does my daughter’s hair also, because she’s the same as me. Actually, he came in and gave her a few fuchsia streaks in her hair. I’m cool with the fuchsia streaks. And my husband [David Bowie] can’t say anything! Once, my daughter saw the pictures of Ziggy Stardust and she said, ‘Why are you wearing makeup?’ And he was like, ‘Why didn’t she say anything about my hair?’ [Laughs] He just said, ‘It was the ‘70s.’ We all tell her, ‘Oh, it was the ‘70s!’—we tell her that for anything! She’ll say, ‘Oh, you smoked,’ and we say, ‘It was the ‘70s.’ [Laughs]

"First of all, I was born in Somalia, which is in East Africa. My parents started with nothing: poor, poor, poor. They eloped, which was unheard of in my country, when my father was 17 and my mother was 14. They were political activists, and they were part and parcel of the youth of that generation in my country that actually got independence for my country. Later, my father became the [Somalian] ambassador for the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Egypt. So, I went from having nothing to being an ambassador’s daughter living abroad who was taken to school by a chauffeur-driven car. But then we had a revolution, were sent back home, and then people started disappearing or being put into court and put in jail.

My mom decided one day that we should leave the country, so she put us in a van in the middle of the night and we crossed the Kenyan boarder by foot with nothing but the clothes on our back. We instantly became, in 1970, refugees. I was barely 15. The Kenyan government granted us asylum and also gave us scholarships—the kids—but we were only given, like, two years after that, at which point we should be fending for ourselves. I decided that I was going to get a part time job, and the only thing that I could come up with was the Ministry of Tourism in Kenya—I spoke five languages and tourism was just becoming big there, especially French and Italian. But there were no brochures for them, because everything was in English, so I began to translate the brochures into French and Italian. It was easy because I could just take the brochures to the [university] campus and translate them at my leisure.

One afternoon, on my way to the campus—I was majoring in political science at Nairobi University—a photographer by the name of Peter Beard stopped me in the street and asked me if I’d ever been photographed. And first I thought he was going to kick me, and second, ‘Why do people always think that we’ve never seen cameras?’ [Laughs] And I said, ‘Of course I have.’ Now, in the meantime, I had never seen fashion magazines—I was 16, 16-and-a-half. So, he proceeded to talk to me about modeling and all this, and I had never heard of modeling, I’ve never seen fashion magazines, makeup, heels, nothing. I had no concept of what he was talking about. And he kept walking with me and talking and then he said the magic words: ‘I’ll pay you.’ [Laughs] I said, ‘How much?’ And he said, ‘How much do you want?’ And I said, ‘$8000,’ because that was the tuition for university. For me, it was like zero from zero, what do I have to lose? He said, ‘Isn’t that a bit high?’ And I said, ‘That’s the tuition I need!’ [Laughs] He said, ‘OK, I’ll pay for the tuition.’ He took pictures; some of them are here [in my office], like the one with the necklace [3]. I thought that would be the last time I was going to see him. He paid my tuition.

I think five or six months later, a friend of mine who worked at Pan Am—that’s how long ago it was, Pan Am existed—Peter called her office, since I didn’t have a phone, and told her to get ahold of me and that he’d call me from New York the next day. It was him and the woman who owned Wilhelmina agency [Wilhelmina Cooper] on the phone. Apparently Peter had a gallery opening, and on the cover of the invitation was my picture, and that’s how Wilhelmina saw it. And it was like, ‘We’ve got to get her here, blah, blah, blah.’ I listened, but I had a couple of problems: I was not 18 yet, so I was still underage and I couldn’t leave the country without the consent of my parents. And my parents would not have given me consent to leave. Second of all, I didn’t have the cash for it and I couldn’t get a passport unless they signed for it. So I forged the passport, didn’t tell [Peter or the agency]—the only thing I told them I needed was a return ticket [to Kenya]. I was thinking I could go there, check it out, and come back. If I wanted to stay, then I’d get permission from my parents. But I had no idea what I was going to be doing in New York. So [Peter and the agency] agreed to the airfare, they sent the ticket and the open return ticket and I didn’t tell my parents anything. I thought, ‘What could happen? I’ll go, check it out—as if it was around the corner—and be back.’ And I’ve been here since.

But you know how my parent’s found out? I arrived here and literally there was a press conference waiting for me the next day. Apparently, there had been a one-page story in the New York Post by the late Eugenia Sheppard a few months before I arrived. A whole page on me! There were pictures of me that Peter took, and the story said that they were trying to get me here to become a model, that I was a goat herder… I mean, I’d seen goats, but really? And that I didn’t speak a word of English. I spoke five languages! Totally mythology. I had no clue about that… I arrived, and the next day, I had 64 members of the press. They started asking questions to Peter, and I was like, ‘I can answer in English!’ And they were like, ‘You can speak English?’ [Laughs] That’s how it happened. I told the media exactly who I was that day, and in hindsight, years later, people have said that it was very racist, or that Peter Beard was racist and all of that. But to me, it was not racist because I was in it. You know what I mean? I was a conspirator, I was co-conspirator. For god’s sake, I forged my passport to get here! It’s not like somebody lied to me. So no, I didn’t think it was.

There were African-American models, yes, but I was treated differently. This is because I come from a very political family, and I was foreign. Certain things were so strange to me, like when people would describe me, whether they’d seen pictures in the papers or in front of me, they’d say, ‘She’s a black model.’ I was like, ‘What? Why am I called ‘black’?’ Because nobody has ever called me black—I come from a black country so who is going to call me black? [Laughs] But also, it wasn’t lost on me—why I was being treated differently—because they were treating their own [black] models as separate from me. I think, in general, people are much kinder to a foreigner, especially when it comes to race issues. They were saying I was the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen—I mean, come on, there were beautiful girls here! Beverly Johnson was one of the top models at that time. So, they didn’t treat it the same way. This applies to foreigners even when they’re white, from Eastern Europe or wherever—there’s a different way of treating [foreigners].

I come from a country that’s known for beautiful women. And at my high school ‘prom,’ so to speak, the girls couldn’t decide which boy to go with. Nobody asked me! My father paid my cousin to take me! I was not considered beautiful at all. Really. And this is what all models say. But I’m still not considered that beautiful in my country. I don’t know the beauty ideal where I come from—but it’s not me. [Laughs] I mean, I’ve seen it—what they considered beautiful—but it’s not me. I had terrible self-esteem issues when I was growing up. I still do, I just hide it better now. That’s one of the things that’s good about age—you come to accept it all. It’s like, if I’ve gotten this far, it’s got to be something good. To get into modeling with bad self-esteem, it’s like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ It’s a place where all of your insecurities are heightened. You think you look great and Cindy Crawford walks in and then you’re fucked. [Laughs]

I learned about modeling on the job, and I had a system. Remember that most people didn’t think that I spoke English, so I devised a system where I didn’t say much. People freely talked in front of me, and I listened as I went along and learned how to maneuver this minefield that is fashion, because you know, you’re so replaceable, so exchangeable. To me, it really was a business transaction, it was not anything else. It was a way of taking care of my family, of putting my brothers and sisters through schooling. I had a vested interest in a different point of view, and I always had longevity in mind—it’s about how to make this thing work for you. That helped in the negotiations. The power’s not always in someone else’s hands, because I could walk away from it; there was no desperation. And as a black model, it’s even more important because then you will know how not to be abused. When I came here, there was a certain price [in a model fee] that they would pay the white models and not the black models. And I said, ‘I’m not going to do it.’ I always thought, ‘What do I have to lose? Nothing! I can always go back, I have a return ticket.’ [Laughs]

There are highlights when you become irreplaceable as a model, like when you become a muse to designers. They look at you differently; you’re not a coat hanger for hire. Saint Laurent asked me to be his muse for a couture collection, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be exciting, great, I’ve never done anything like this.’ But it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The job description: you walk into this atelier and they give you a white lab coat, silk black pantyhose, like from the 1940s, with a seam at the back. And they give you stiletto heels—of course, YSL’s. You take your bra and underwear off, put the lab coat on, and you’re ushered into the showroom. And the salon had bolts of fabric, and literally there was no sketching—he just took hours on end and actually cut the fabric on my body and then it was sewed in. He created the whole thing on me, and when the collection was finished, he called it ‘The African Queen.’ Saint Laurent was particularly receptive to models of color—he was a champion of that. I think, first of all, because he was French, and second, he had a love of color. He grew up in Morocco. And it wasn’t just black models—he had Indian and Pakistani models, he had Balinese models, he had Thai models. It was part of how he mixed things, and his concept of colors. I think about him when I’m designing my fabric collection. I mean, you would see the colors he would put together and at first, you would say, ‘This is so garish.’ And then, it becomes magic.

Out of all of my projects, including my line for HSN, Iman Global Chic, and my website, Destination Iman, my cosmetics are the thing I’m most proud of. Actually, the seed for Iman Cosmetics was implanted in my head in 1975 on my first job for American Vogue. It was a white model and me, and the makeup artist asked me if I brought my own foundation because he had nothing for me. And I had no idea what he was talking about. [Laughs] I said, ‘No.’ And he proceeded to put something on me and when I looked in the mirror, I looked grey. And you have to understand that our currency as models is our images—it’s photographs. Nobody cares how you really look, it’s how do you look in pictures. That day, my saving grace was that those pictures came out in black-and-white, and black-and-white hides lots of things. [Laughs] But after the shoot, I went to every store I could think of and asked for foundation, looking for something that had any pigment like mine. And whatever came close, I bought. I remembered what [the makeup artist] did, he mixed things. And that’s what I did, I mixed. I'd try on the foundation that I just mixed and I would take a Polaroid to see how it came out in pictures. And if it was too red, then I’d mix another one. When I found something that looked good or reasonable in the pictures, I made a batch. I would bring my own foundation to shoots and then, after that, most black models would ask me, ‘Can I use your batch?’ It was just mixtures of things—some of it was creamy eye shadows. Anything to make a pigment that had the right color. I created my line in 1989, after I stopped modeling.

Modeling is about making something of yourself, becoming irreplaceable for the designer. It has to be a thought-through thing, how do you become more? That’s what it is to be professional model: what do you bring to the game? How do you dress when you go to see a designer? It’s those small things that make you have longevity. A lot of young girls don’t understand it. They say, ‘Oh, I love Linda Evangelista.’ But she was working for, like, ten years before she hit it. And once she hit it she knew everything about it, so there was no way that she couldn’t get her throne.

Young girls don’t understand that it takes knowledge. You’ve got to look at the old magazines, you’ve got to look at the old pictures, the old poses, to be able to deconstruct it and make it modern—make it you. You can’t say that you want to look like somebody else. Who cares? This is a different time, they want somebody new. Nowadays when you hear people say, ‘Oh, models, they don’t make them like they used to in the ‘80s, the supermodels,’ I don’t know what they’re talking about. Coco Rocha, Karlie Kloss—they’re as good as Linda Evangelista! They’re great models of their time. You can’t revisit pasts. You have to be of your time and make that time shine and become unique to you."

—as told to ITG

http://intothegloss.com/2012/11/iman-abdulmajid-part-1/