Iman explains how she set aside grieving David Bowie to help their daughter through it
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The supermodel says her daughter Lexi was 15 when Bowie died, and getting her through it took precedence over anything she was feeling herself.
Iman had a 15-year-old to get through it. Everything else waited.
Speaking with PEOPLE at (RED)’s 20th anniversary celebration at Electric Lady Studios in New York on Sept. 9, the supermodel and activist, 71, explained how the immediate aftermath of David Bowie’s 2016 death reshaped her own mourning.
Her daughter, Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones, was a teenager at the time, and Iman said that consumed everything. “I was so busy trying to get her through that, so I didn’t pay attention to my own grief,” she told the outlet, adding simply, “So actually, my grief came later.”
When it did arrive, she found a limit she wanted to set around it. Iman described reaching a point where she no longer wanted every thought of Bowie to produce tears, reasoning that it isn’t what the people we lose would want for us. What she aimed for instead was keeping the memory itself joyful.
That approach has shaped how she talks about him publicly in the years since. Iman regularly posts tributes on Instagram, particularly around anniversaries and Father’s Day, and has consistently rejected language that files Bowie away as past tense.
She told PEOPLE in 2021 that she still feels married, recalling that when someone referred to him as her late husband, she corrected them. Through memory, she said, her love lives.
Their history began on a blind date in Los Angeles in 1990. Bowie later described it as love at first sight, while Iman has said her own feelings took a few months to catch up. They married in 1992, first privately in Lausanne, Switzerland, and again later that year in Florence. Lexi was born in August 2000. Iman also has a son from an earlier relationship.
Bowie died at 69 following a battle with liver cancer.
The most recent marker came in January, when Iman got a wrist tattoo commemorating both the decade since his death and his final album. She described the design to PEOPLE at the (RED) event, noting the lettering spells his name in stars.