by Kate Bennett
Melania spent the early part of her life in a modest communist apartment, as did most residents of Slovenia. The apartment was tiny, drab, a signature of communist housing that defined what was then Yugoslavian living. Communism in Slovenia shaped a generation who was willing to settle for, who even expected and was grateful for, the bare minimum. President Josip Broz Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, ingrained in his people that being humble was noble and that standing out was bad. The general thought about Yugoslavia at the time was that if communism was going to be the rule, they had it better than most other communist countries. Tito taught his people to keep their heads down and not lust for anything special. It was a lifestyle that created an intensely private population of mind-your-own-business types. But it also had the effect of producing the odd citizen who longed for a shinier penny … or a gilded penthouse.
Back then, Melania’s father, Viktor, was working as a chauffeur for the mayor of a neighboring town. He would later become a car-parts salesman for a state-owned company, climbing through the ranks, working the system to ingratiate himself to the local communist party bigwigs. It was simply fact that most leadership at the factories and businesses in town were communist, so if life was better if the boss liked you, you had better like communism. Aligning with the party became a way to get ahead: the money, the power, the resources—all were in the hands of the communists, and Viktor understood that to maneuver his family out of the tiny apartment and into a better life, he had to play along. Young Melania was a diligent observer of how he operated and how committed he was, sacrificing at any cost for his children so that they could live in a good house closer to town, attend good schools, go on beach and ski vacations, and be set, if only slightly, ahead of their peers.
There would later, during Trump’s presidency, be rumors that Viktor was still connected to Communism, even on friendly terms with Russian president Vladimir Putin. There was also a conspiracy theory that Melania herself was a planted Russian spy. Neither proves true.
The house Melania spent her later childhood years in is located in one of the posher areas of Sevnica, if there is such a thing. The windy roads in the neighborhood are lined with cozy split-level houses, more San Bernardino than Beverly Hills, but comparatively a nice place to raise a family. There’s a balcony, a large attached garage that houses Viktor’s beloved Mercedes-Benz, blinds on every window, and a rooftop satellite dish. The place hasn’t become the tourist attraction one might have anticipated since their daughter became prava dama of the United States, but when her mother, Amalija, and Viktor are in town, security guards have been spotted near the driveway.
Nowadays, a waning part of living in Sevnica is scooping up profits from exploiting its famous former inhabitant, whether that’s spurred by actual Melania Trump hometown boastfulness or a healthy desire to capture tourist dollars has yet to be determined, not that anyone cares. Trump himself would be impressed with the shops and businesses that have churned out everything from M-branded hand cream to local Krskopoljc sausages (there is an annual festival in town to celebrate the regional meat). The town’s Cafe Julija still makes its Melania dessert, a pastry with white chocolate streaked gold on the outside and warm apple and almond filling on the inside. Competitive spirit launched nearby Kruhek Bakery and Coffee Shop’s tarts, served for two dollars a pop with a tiny USA flag stuck on top and the letter M dusted in powdered sugar.
As American as Slovenian apple pie.
Korpitarna Shoes, one of Sevnica’s longest and most thriving businesses—there is a statue of a large boot in the center of the traffic circle that leads into town—makes a Melania-inspired bedroom slipper that is sparkly gray flannel with a white faux-fur pom-pom on top. The label on the slipper’s inside says WHITE HOUSE.
Ironically, friends say one of the things Melania hates most about her fame is people trying to make money off it. She’s learned from her husband: if she can’t have a cut of the profits, they shouldn’t be earned in the first place. She will legally fight back, and has, when her name or likeness is used without her permission, which is why in Sevnica everything is branded FIRST LADY, WHITE HOUSE, and M, substitutes for the word “Melania.” A legal tangle with Slovenian tabloid Suzy in the summer of 2016 showed that writing falsehoods about Melania Trump isn’t something she lets go of. She’s like her husband in this way—only when she threatens to sue for slander, she actually goes through with it. And she wins. After Suzy published a story saying Melania had worked as an escort, she hired a pit-bull Slovenian lawyer who went after the magazine, pursuing an apology, a retraction, and monetary damages. Melania won the case for an undisclosed amount of money. “The first lady is very well acquainted with the law in the field of personal rights violations,” says her attorney, Nataša Pirc Musar, adding that she admired Melania for her “calm and gentle determination. She is one of the most organized persons I have worked with, and always really well informed about the issues we needed to discuss.”
Back when she was a child, Melania and her older sister, Ines, were two bright-eyed little girls who enjoyed after-school activities and their lessons. They went to the local elementary school, Sava Kladinka, where it was impressed on them not to stand out but to be a positive participant in communism. Individuality was not encouraged in children, which for two creative girls was a difficult rule to adhere to. Though remembered not as troublemakers but good little communist daughters, Melania and Ines instead indulged their creativity at home, drawing pictures and helping Amalija sew clothes.
Adult work schedules were also assigned and strictly adhered to, which meant most days would end at 3:00 in the afternoon so families would have time to spend together—another benefit for Melania, who worshiped her older sister and was coddled by her parents. Melania and Ines were thick as thieves, each other’s best friend. Though older by a couple of years, Ines was Melania’s touchstone; the two shared a bedroom for most of their young lives and would later be roommates as Melania traveled throughout Europe to model and lived in Milan and Paris.
Melania and her sister were enamored with their mother, an exceptionally stylish woman who worked as a patternmaker and cutter at Jutranjka, a state-owned factory that produced mostly children’s clothing. She made her own clothes and outfits for her daughters. Under communist rule, trendy clothes were hard to come by at stores, if they existed at all, and they often did not. Amalija, however, insisted that her children be properly and fashionably dressed, even if that meant staying up for hours in the evenings, long after the girls had gone to bed, to sew them cute skirts and tops. Melania and her sister would often participate in the factory’s frequent fashion shows, modeling the clothing that the workers at Jutranjka helped put into production. It was here, back in the early 1970s, that Melania got her first taste for fashion and the runway. And it was Amalija who taught her daughters that being even that much better than the rest was worth the extra effort.
Otherwise, childhood in Sevnica was fairly average for Melania. Not knowing any other way of life, communist rule felt normal. “When you grow up, you don’t think, ‘Oh, I’m growing up under communism,’ you understand what I mean?” said Melania. “You’re just a kid. You go on the bike, you do gymnastics, you enjoy your friends. My parents provided a great, solid life for our family. I have beautiful memories of traveling.” The family was indeed tight-knit: although Viktor was often away in nearby cities for work, he came home to Sevnica to spend weekends with his family. By all accounts, he was a hands-on father and adored his wife, to whom he has been married since 1966.
Her parents’ marriage and Melania’s conventional childhood had a tremendous influence on Melania. She was determined that when she got married, she would stay married (which made Trump a peculiar gamble). After she had Barron in 2006, it was all the more important for her to maintain the normalcy for him that she experienced during her formative years, despite living in extremely atypical circumstances.
Slovenian primary schools run from ages seven to fif
teen, during which time Melania developed a real taste for fashion design, poring over the rare glossy magazine that Amalija would at times get her hands on at work and bring home. When she was ten years old, CNN came on the scene, and watching the rest of the world via the cable news network was an epiphany for Melania. The images she saw and the clothes people wore represented something so completely compelling that she set her mind to becoming one of the artists who would create such beautiful designs. Melania’s ability to knock out a decent sketch was good. Ines also liked to draw and paint and had inherited a bit of artistic flair, and when Melania later pursued a modeling career, Ines tried her hand at fashion design.
Melania had a knack for understanding proportion and fit, again thanks in large part to watching her mother piece together remnant fabric from the factory into wearable clothes. When she became first lady of the United States, even those who have a strong distaste for her gave her credit for her taste—“she knows what looks good on her” is an oft-repeated phrase. And it is true. Melania has always had the ability to buy off the rack and know inherently what will work with her five-foot-eleven frame. It’s a rare sartorial skill that many women think they have, but most don’t.
Melania was enthralled by the structure of a garment and how to turn something commonplace into something standout. In a country where there was just one kind of soup, one kind of bread, one kind of button for your shirt, Melania had an active and aspirational imagination. Whether it was adding a pin or a patch, sewing on a tiny cloth flower, or changing a button on a shirt, Melania would quietly but determinedly express her flair for fashion.
She put her nascent design skills to work and, as elementary school and middle school ended, applied as a fifteen-year-old to the Srednja Šola za Oblikovanje in Fotografijo (High School of Design and Photography) in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s small but bustling capital city, more than an hour’s train ride away from Sevnica. The school was a very competitive technical secondary school, the only one of its kind in the city, and served ages sixteen to nineteen, as most high schools in Slovenia do. The centuries-old school building is impressive even today, and it still operates as a school for kids with a penchant for photography and design.
The school is right in the center of town and features a large cobblestone courtyard, adjacent to a Byzantine church; students pass from classroom to classroom via outdoor hallways connected by balconied archways decorated with columns overflowing with ivy. An amphitheater takes up a large portion of the campus and is still used for concerts and performances, the school taking on the role of cultural hub for the city.
There were only a couple dozen students in each class, thirty tops, and acceptance was difficult, especially for someone who didn’t live inside the city limits—but Melania, determined, took the required tests, passed, and got in. The school was exclusive and relatively expensive, says one of her classmates. She recalls Melania as a nice and simple girl who immersed herself in the fashion design courses offered, one of four divisions in the overall program: fashion, industrial design, graphic design, and photography.
Melania didn’t socialize after school all that much, but that was mainly because she was rushing to catch the train home in the afternoons, an arduous commute for any teenager, but especially one trying to acclimate to her peers. While it isolated her socially, it also highlighted Melania’s early sense of responsibility. Throughout the various stages of her life, people who know her almost always fondly describe her as sort of a wet blanket, not one to hang out or change her schedule to grab a coffee or a drink, never one to stay out too late, always sticking to the rule book. She was a giant nerd, disguised in the body of a five-foot-eleven fashion model.
After a year or so of commuting back and forth to school, Amalija and Viktor relented and rented a small flat for Melania and Ines, who was now also attending school in Ljubljana. Though older, Ines had stayed in Sevnica when Melania went off to school in the big city, but when her sister found success in Ljubljana, Ines soon followed. Hyper-responsible, both teenagers were living on their own, with weekend visits from their mother and stopovers from their dad whenever business took him into the city. They did not throw wild parties. They hardly even had friends over, but the freedom to do nothing but be together was, for the Knavs girls, quite literally heaven. Viktor once gave Amalija a fancy gold bracelet, and when the girls were younger, their parents had replicas of it made, one for Melania and one for Ines, and gave them as gifts under the tree one Christmas morning. Melania would later say the bracelets symbolized their love for one another as a family. Theirs was a strong bond based on loyalty, a foreshadow of the family life Melania would eventually try to uphold, under the most ridiculous of circumstances.
Despite their relative monastic existence as teens, one thing that did help Melania’s popularity was modeling. She began working for Slovenia’s most well-known photographer, Stane Jerko; he discovered her walking in a school-sponsored fashion show in Ljubljana when she was about sixteen years old. “She was cute,” said Jerko in a 2016 interview. “Big girl, long legs, and I said she would be a good model. At the time, I was looking for girls on the street who would be suitable for photography.”
It was rare for a young girl like Melania to be modeling, especially for someone like Jerko, who was respected for his work, and not for some creep making a lurid proposition. Her classmates thought it cool. Jerko, who at eighty-one still lives and takes photographs in Ljubljana, was famous for discovering the two Slovenian models who made it to mild notoriety outside of Slovenia, Nina Gazibara and Martina Kajfez, the latter a sultry brunette with piercing blue eyes who bears a bit of a resemblance to Melania.
The whispers that she was modeling for Jerko gave Melania, a bland, soft-spoken student at the school, a bit of an edge, one she desperately lacked in the mid-eighties Eastern European world of permed hair and brightly colored leggings and sweaters. She didn’t have boyfriends, and she kept her circle of girlfriends close. A former classmate says Melania didn’t abuse the privilege of being exceptionally pretty, nor, as a properly raised Slovenian, did she boast about her modeling activities. Instead, she took a few photographs with Jerko from time to time, enough to cobble together an average portfolio. She brought her own clothes to the studio, and Jerko shot her wearing a handful of different outfits, though barefoot, because he didn’t have fancy shoes to fit her size 9 feet.
“She was a very ordinary girl; she had to pretty much make do with herself,” said Jerko, which would be a terribly unflattering assessment if it wasn’t what would be echoed for two decades to come by those who encountered Melania during her modeling years. Following her career from afar, Jerko said that Melania must have taken the business very seriously and been very dogged in her pursuit of work, because to survive solely on the skills she had would require “nerves and strong will.” In other words, it took more than her natural looks.
Several decades later, Melania’s beauty can leave people breathless in Washington, D.C. (not a city known for its beautiful people) or Kansas, but in the world of models, moderate to elite, she was pretty average.
Jerko’s photographs show a very different Melania than the one we now know. She’s smiling a lot in the pictures, striking poses with her arms at various angles. She is stiff in a cute sort of I’m-a-little-teapot way, more than loose model moves. In some photos she has her hair piled on top of her head in a spiky high ponytail, all bushy eyebrows and strong, pouty mouth. In another series, where she looks the most like she does today, Melania wears a white strapless dress, her hair slicked back in a bun, barefoot and scowling. “These photos somehow triggered her modeling career,” says Jerko, sounding a bit surprised himself that things took off for Melania as they did. His chief complaint at the time was that Melania took her schoolwork too seriously. “I wanted to photograph her for the magazine Nasa zena, but she did not have time.”
Melania was too busy doing the things girls her age did. She and her school pals loved listening to Duran Duran,
Spandau Ballet, Men at Work, and popular American or Italian bands. The first concert she attended was Elton John, in Zagreb, Croatia, when she was sixteen. A friend from those years says the feeling in Slovenia after it disentangled itself from Yugoslavia to become its own nation—which officially happened in 1991—was freeing. Suddenly, they were able to have things they didn’t have growing up. “Like jeans.” She and Melania and other girls their age would often travel about an hour’s train trip west to Trieste, Italy, just over the Slovenian border, if they wanted denim or other fashionable items like Adidas sneakers. Now, they didn’t have to. Jeans were as tame a status symbol as could be, but they were still practically a prerequisite for a cool urban teenager at the time. Without screaming “I’m hip to the scene,” they indicated a smooth transition from communist clothing to “normal” duds. Wearing them, as all the kids at her school did, was one of the ways Melania learned early on to use fashion as a messaging tool. Her voice might not be loud, but her clothing could speak volumes, a skill she would rely on heavily when she began living in the White House.
But the rush of being able to wear Levi’s still didn’t mean Melania and her peers would abandon their inward Slovenian selves. “We are still very simple, and we don’t like to push ourselves into first place,” says Melania’s old school friend. “In Italy, when we would go, if Italians see a camera it’s ‘Hi, mama! ciao, ciao!’ but we’re totally different, totally opposite. We don’t show it on our faces—we are closed, and that’s how we like to be.” Later, one of the chief speculations made about Melania as first lady is that she looks freakin’ miserable and hates living in the White House, that her face, for all its beauty, belies a sadness and displeasure with her role. Most people can’t believe that her expressions lend themselves to any other interpretation. But ask a Slovenian if “resting bitch face” is a thing in their country, and they will look blankly at you and say, “it’s just ‘face.’”