Following the death of her husband David Bowie in 2016, the supermodel Iman began exclusively wearing his favourite fragrance, a vetiver scent by Tom Ford. Now, she’s worked the woody scent into her debut fragrance, “Love Memoir”, in tribute to the late musical icon.

“I thought, actually, that I’d gone and processed my grief,” says Iman of Bowie’s death from cancer five years ago (via Vanity Fair). “I did not, because I was mothering my daughter, who was still a teenager when he passed away.” It was only during coronavirus lockdown — which planted her in the upstate New York house that the couple built together — that she finally worked through the loss, she explains, and gradually formulated the perfume project. “I couldn’t escape,” she adds. “There was nowhere to go but through the process of the grief, and the memories are what sustained me.”

Blending vetiver with notes of bergamot, rose, French vanilla, and black currant, the fragrance includes references to the whole span of Iman’s relationship with Bowie. “One of the scents that really meant a lot to me was bergamot because it reminded me of Italy,” she tells WWD, reminiscing on their 1992 marriage in Florence, Tuscany. “Every note for me evokes those memories and special times we shared.”

On the other hand, Iman returned to daily life in her New York home for the “Love Memoir” bottle — an amber oval with a hammered gold topper — drawing inspiration from the sunsets she watched daily, as well as the stones she stacked like cairns in the garden, as “memorials” for Bowie.

“What was really clear to me is that at the end of our days the most important thing and the most cherished thing that we hold on and will sustain us through the rest of our lives is our memories that we have shared with our loved ones,” the model says. “(The fragrance) was really a tribute to my love — my eternal love and devotion to my husband.”