They met on October 1990 on a blind date set up by a mutual friend.
Bowie fell in love with her at first sight:
“I was naming the children the night we met … it was absolutely immediate.” However, Iman was reluctant to a date a rock star. In an interview she shared, “I did not want to get involved with a rock star. No way. It is not a sane thing to do, but David changed my mind. He wooed me.”
“I remember once we went out to dinner and the laces on my trainers came undone, and David was down on his knees in the middle of the street, tying them for me. I thought to myself, ‘This one’s a keeper.’”
“His actions spoke louder [than words],” she said. “We were dating for two weeks and I was coming from Paris and I got to L.A. at the airport and the doors open to the plane and I come out and I see all these people taking a picture of somebody. And he was standing there, flowers in hand, no security. That was when I knew he was a keeper. He didn’t care if anyone saw.”
They have been together ever since.
“My marriage is exactly as fabulous as you all would think.” She grinned.
”We have dates, you know – we’ll go to a museum, then we’ll have a long lunch. That’s what’s interesting, that’s what’s exciting.”
”First, you fancy each other – that doesn’t go. It might take different forms, but he’s good company. He’s funny, he’s engaging, he’s whip-smart, he’s interested in diverse things. It keeps on evolving – it doesn’t stay sedentary.”
He still ties her shoelaces at times, and still buys Iman her favourite flowers on the 14th of every month: the anniversary of the day they met.
As for their relationship at home: “David doesn’t fight, He is English, so he just stays quiet. I’m the screamer. Then he always makes me laugh. It’s like cabaret. I keep him entertained too.”
“I still fancy him, totally, after all these years.”
“He has managed, somehow I don’t know, miraculously, to have my heart flutter when he walks into the room still. So, yes he’s definitely the one, he’s definitely my one.”
“‘I am not married to David Bowie — I am married to David Jones. They are two totally different people.’
“It was so lucky that we were to meet at that time in our lives, when we were both yearning for each other,” says Bowie. “She is an incredibly beautiful woman, but that’s just one thing. It’s what’s in there that counts.”
What’s “in there”, Iman confesses, is “the wonderful realisation that I have found my soul mate, with whom sexual compatibility is just the tip of the iceberg. We have so much in common, and are totally alike in a lot of things”. It’s not a love of music, or fashion, or the fact that “like David has his feminine side, I have a masculine side”, she insists, but the more old-fashioned values: romance, family, commitment.
Bowie on their relationship says, ”I don’t have that sense of loneliness that I had before, which was very, very strong. It became a subtext for a lot of things I wrote.”
“We work hard at keeping the relationship alive. We talk to each other continuously. We have complete and absolute faith in each other.”
