Ewuraba - Professional African Women with Class and Style

The supermodel Iman officially retired from the catwalk in 1989, but to see her on the set of a fashion shoot is to know she's still a pro.

'OK, where do you want to start?' she asks the photographer, one hand on her hip, ready to comply but also all business. With the exception of a scarf she's tied dramatically around her hair, Iman is dressed simply in a black shirt and skinny trousers, both of which display a body that's still, after 51 years of use and two children, enviably long and lean.

As the camera starts clicking, she poses her body into what looks like a modified S, then shifts from one sinuous stance to the next. She angles out one leg and points a toe; she looks up from lowered lids; she smiles. When the photographer takes a break, Iman moves her lips a little, as if exercising them to keep them in shape for the various alluring expressions she'll need to keep conjuring.

'OK, that cropping is off,' she suddenly tells the photographer, looking suspiciously at an image she can see on the computer screen that cuts her off mid-thigh. 'That cropping doesn't work at all.' She doesn't sound nervous or vain; she sounds direct and authoritative, appropriately enough, given that she's more of a chief executive these days than a beautiful face for hire - Iman Cosmetics, Skincare and Fragrances, the make-up company she started in 1994 to provide make-up for dark-skinned women, is still going strong, having recently landed a lucrative licensing agreement with Procter & Gamble.

She would have been a legendary model had she simply retired after blazing a trail as one of the first black women to grace the catwalk; but unlike, say, Beverly Johnson, Vogue's first black covergirl, who's never been heard of since, Iman found a way to remain in the limelight, with the thriving make-up company, with her charity work - and with a 15-year-long marriage to David Bowie, whose arty glamour adds cachet to her own.

As we walk to a hotel in lower Manhattan after the shoot, she tells me how she and Bowie chose to live in New York because it's one of the few places they can go undisturbed. 'My husband, he sits outside a café in our neighbourhood and reads the paper and no one bothers him,' she says. 'New Yorkers would be humiliated to say something.'

As she enters the hotel restaurant, resplendent and made-up, it's true no one approaches her - but almost all heads turn from their business lunches to gaze upon the apparition in their midst.

If they've seen her face recently, it was most likely in profile, with an artful streak of tribal-inspired make-up on her cheek, an image that appeared as part of an advertising campaign that Iman herself helped to conceive. i am african ran the caption below her image (additional copy directed the viewer to the website for the charity Keep a Child Alive, which asks donors to give $1 a day to provide antiretroviral drugs to African children and families ravaged by HIV).

But it wasn't just Iman, who was born in Somalia, who posed for the ad campaign: she also convinced Heidi Klum and Sarah Jessica Parker and Liv Tyler and Gwyneth Paltrow to pose the same way (not to mention Bowie, and Klum's husband, Seal), with the same caption below their faces.

The idea: to appeal to our common humanity, and also to remind us that Africa is the birthplace of our species. 'The problem I had was, how do I come up with images that will be classic and stop people in their tracks and make them think; make them think about how Africa is not separate from the world?' she says.

Given the competition for celebrities' goodwill, it wasn't an easy task to round up these faces. Even for somebody as exalted as her. 'Most of these celebrities, I'd never met them in my life,' says Iman, who originally sent out letters to their managers and was greeted with 'dead silence'. So she turned to what she characterises as a typically Somali combination of charm and directness.