Love Story between rock star David Bowie and supermodel Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid
October 1990. Los Angeles. David Bowie was 43 years old, and secretly exhausted.
Not from the music. Not from the fame. From the loneliness hiding behind it.
After every sold-out show, after every standing ovation, he'd go back to an empty hotel room. His hairstylist and close friend Teddy Antolin watched it happen night after night and quietly decided to do something about it.
Teddy had recently met a woman at a Los Angeles party — Cik Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid. Somali supermodel. Fashion icon. Fiercely intelligent, deeply private, and completely unimpressed by celebrity. She'd been through her own storms, her own heartbreaks, and she had zero interest in getting tangled up with a rock star.
"No way," she'd later say. "It is not a sane thing to do."
Teddy invited them both to his birthday dinner. He didn't tell either one about the other.
When David arrived that evening, he had no idea his life was about to permanently change direction.
When Iman walked in, the entire room shifted.
"She just claimed the room," Teddy recalled. "All the attention went to her."
David Bowie — the man who had commanded stages for three decades, who had invented personas that changed the face of music forever — stood completely still and couldn't look away.
They talked all night. Just the two of them, in the middle of a crowded party, as if no one else existed.
At the end of the evening, Bowie offered to drive her home.
Iman looked at him calmly and said: "No. I'm going to drive my car."
Then she left.
Bowie went home and, by his own admission, immediately started thinking about what to name their children.
The next day, he called and invited her to tea.
When she arrived, she discovered something that made her smile: David Bowie didn't actually drink tea. He'd offered it because it seemed like the polite, gentlemanly thing to do.
They went to a coffee shop instead.
And that afternoon, Iman didn't meet David Bowie the rock star.
She met David Jones — a quietly spoken, curious Englishman from Brixton who asked her questions about her life and genuinely listened to every answer.
That small difference changed everything.
Over the weeks that followed, he didn't perform for her. He showed up.
He sent flowers on the 14th of every month — the anniversary of the night they met.
When Iman flew from Paris to Los Angeles, she stepped off the plane to find cameras pointed at someone in the arrivals hall. Standing there, completely exposed to the public, no security, no entourage — just David. Holding flowers. Not caring who saw.
"That was when I knew," Iman said years later.
Once, walking together in the city, her shoelace came undone. Without hesitating, David got down on both knees in the middle of the street and tied it for her.
"I thought to myself," she recalled with a smile, "'This one's a keeper.'"
He also quietly began changing his life — clearing out old habits, showing up steadier and more present than he had been in years. He wanted to be worthy of her. Not worthy of her admiration. Worthy of her trust.
He proposed. She said no.
Not because she didn't love him. But because she needed him to understand something first.
"You're not just marrying me," she told him. "You're marrying my tribe, my family."
So he tried again — this time in Paris, on the Seine, with a pianist and a song he sang himself.
She said yes.
On 24 April 1992, they married privately at Lausanne City Hall in Switzerland — two witnesses, an interpreter, and no press. The world didn't find out for ten days.
On 6 June 1992, they celebrated in Florence, Italy, at a Tuscan villa with 68 guests including Bono and Yoko Ono. David wore Thierry Mugler. Iman wore Hervé Léger. David composed special music for the ceremony.
He was 45. She was 37.
Both had known failure. Both had known fame's strange isolation. Both had finally found what neither persona nor applause had ever given them: someone who saw the real person underneath.
They built a life that, by celebrity standards, was almost radical in its simplicity.
They made New York their home. They avoided the spotlight circuit. They protected their privacy with the same fierceness that other couples protect their arguments.
Bowie once explained it plainly: "I'm not married to David Bowie. I'm married to David Jones. They are two totally different people."
At home, he cooked. He read. He walked their dogs. He went to museums on quiet afternoons. He had inside jokes with his wife and made her laugh over breakfast.
Years into their marriage, Iman would say: "He has managed, somehow, miraculously, to have my heart flutter when he walks into the room still."
When their daughter Alexandria — "Lexi" — was born in August 2000, Bowie was 53. He did school drop-offs. Parent-teacher conferences. Sunday morning pancakes.
"She's the calm center of my life," he said of Iman. "Everything makes sense when I'm with her."
On 8 January 2016 — his 69th birthday — David Bowie released Blackstar, an album critics immediately recognized as a masterpiece.
What almost no one outside his immediate circle knew was that he had been battling liver cancer for 18 months, in complete privacy.
Blackstar was his farewell.
Two days later, on 10 January 2016, David Bowie died peacefully at his home in New York. Iman was with him. So was Lexi. He spent his final years not as a spectacle, but as a husband, a father, and a man finally at home in his own life.
Iman still wears her wedding ring. She still speaks of him in the present tense.
"When people say 'your late husband,'" she told a reporter in 2024, "I always correct them. He is my husband. Not my late husband. He's ever-present with me."
On what would have been their 29th anniversary, she posted a single photo with a single line: "June 6, 1992. The best decision I ever made."
David Bowie spent a lifetime becoming Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, and a hundred other extraordinary characters.
But the greatest transformation of his life wasn't a costume or a persona.
It was the quiet, private decision — made in an ordinary coffee shop, over a drink he didn't even want — to stop performing.
To just be David.
And to spend 26 years being loved for exactly that.
"She's my soulmate," he once said.
And she, still wearing his ring, says simply: "He is my husband. He's ever-present with me."
Some love stories don't need an audience. They just need to be lived.
Adapted from the high-profile love story shared by Story of Life via Facebook posting on Thursday, 19 February 2026.
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| Adapted by Fauzi Kadir Chief Editor
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| Final editing and brought to you by Fauzi Kadir CHIEF EDITOR |
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