Melania’s Origin Story

Melania Trump was born Melanija Knavs, in Sevnica, a small town in Slovenia. Jordan appears to have learned about this period in Eastern European history from dated Cold War propaganda of the crudest, most right-wing variety: she constantly stresses that socialist Yugoslavia under Tito — the most liberal and decentralized of the Eastern European regimes, where ordinary people could freely travel abroad — was a dictatorship, and she dwells on the country’s supposed social conformity. She frequently describes the buildings as “gray,” though at the time, the country was more known for its sunny beach resorts that drew throngs of Western tourists — while its avant-garde modernist architecture was notable enough to have been the subject of a recent MOMA retrospective exhibit (Concrete Utopia).

You’d never know from reading this book that Yugoslavia was a richly complicated society attempting a socialism independent of the Soviet Union. As in some other communist countries, women in socialist Yugoslavia enjoyed a degree of gender equality that eluded their Western counterparts. Maternity leave and childcare allowed women to fully participate in the labor force. The anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee, whose book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism I reviewed in Jacobin, observes that Yugoslavia was one of the socialist countries where “personal relationships could be freed from market influences. Women didn’t have to marry for money.”

The first lady benefited, briefly, from growing up in such a society. She was interested in architecture, and she was ambitious and well educated enough to be admitted to a competitive architecture program. She was also interested in fashion because her town, though otherwise small and obscure, was a major hub of Yugoslavian apparel production, and her mother worked as a designer in a garment factory there. As teenagers, the future first lady and her friends used to travel with Melanjia’s mother to model new products in fashion shows, which they enjoyed very much. Her mother also had a sharp personal sense of style, nourished by her role in the local garment industry.

But the society that nurtured young Melania’s interests had already begun to unravel with Tito’s death in 1980, when she was ten. At nineteen, she dropped out of architecture school and left the country for Milan to make her fortune as a model, and eventually moved to New York, where her modeling career took off. There, her personal brand was boosted by dating a controversial buffoon who would later become president. Jordan notes that it is difficult to find people in Milan’s fashion industry who will talk about working with her. One industry insider offers a reason: “For agents, you want to say, ‘I can make you a supermodel,’ not ‘I can make you the wife of a rich man.’ It’s better in the industry to be known as ‘I can make you Cindy Crawford’ rather than the wife of Berlusconi or Trump.” Jordan reports that Melania was deliberate, calculating, and persistent in her pursuit of Donald Trump — and, of course, ultimately successful.

There may be some shame about this in Milan, but Melania is hardly alone. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, many women who had expected to live a life of relative independence from men found themselves working hard at finding a wealthy husband. Ghodsee notes research showing that women in post-Soviet countries began to view sex and romance far more instrumentally than before — even learning how to land a rich man in “gold digger academies.” In these new capitalist societies, learning how to find a rich husband was a better investment than a university education.

Melania never graduated from architecture school, but she certainly deserves an honorary degree in gold digging. Her story is emblematic of some of the truly unpleasant aspects of capitalism that came back to her native region with a vengeance.