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20 Things You Didn’t Know About Melania Trump

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Before she became America’s First Lady, Melania Trump turned down Donald Trump’s phone number and took his instead.

Melania Trump stepped into the role of First Lady in January 2017 carrying a biography most Americans knew almost nothing about — a Slovenian modeling career, a self-taught grasp of six languages, and a courtship that began at a Fashion Week party in Manhattan. Her convention speech during the 2016 campaign drew intense scrutiny, but her actual life story, from a small town outside Ljubljana to Mar-a-Lago, got far less attention.

Here’s what the record actually shows about the woman born Melanija Knavs on April 26, 1970, and how she ended up as only the second foreign-born First Lady in U.S. history.

• Melania Trump is the second foreign-born First Lady in American history, following Louisa Adams in 1825, and speaks Slovenian, English, French, German, Italian and Serbo-Croatian.
• She met Donald Trump in September 1998 at a Kit Kat Club party during Fashion Week hosted by modeling scout Paolo Zampolli — and famously refused to give him her number, taking his instead.
• The couple married on January 22, 2005, at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Palm Beach with a Mar-a-Lago reception; their son Barron arrived in March 2006, the same year she became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

From Sevnica to the Runways of Milan

Melania grew up in Sevnica, a small Slovenian town, the daughter of Viktor Knavs, a car dealer, and Amalija Knavs, who worked in textile patternmaking. She started modeling at 16 and, in 1992, placed as runner-up in the Slovenian magazine Jana‘s “Look of the Year” contest — the kind of regional competition that functions as a launching pad for European modeling careers.

She enrolled at the University of Ljubljana to study architecture and design but left after just one year to chase modeling work full-time in Milan and Paris, adopting the Germanized surname Knauss along the way. That decision paid off in 1996, when Italian modeling scout and businessman Paolo Zampolli brought her to New York City to work the American market.

The Meeting That Made Headlines

The story of how Melania and Donald Trump met has become part of the couple’s public mythology. In September 1998, Zampolli threw a Fashion Week party at the Kit Kat Club in Manhattan, and Donald Trump was there. When he asked for her number, she turned him down flat.

She’s only the second foreign-born First Lady in American history — the first since Louisa Adams in 1825.

Instead of handing over her own contact information, Melania took down Donald’s personal numbers and called him herself days later. It’s a small detail, but it says a lot about the dynamic that would define their relationship for the next two decades, and it’s the kind of origin story that gets revisited every time her transformation from model to political spouse comes up in profiles.

Marriage, Motherhood and Citizenship

Donald and Melania married on January 22, 2005, at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Palm Beach, Florida, with the reception held at Mar-a-Lago. She wore a custom Christian Dior gown for the ceremony, a detail fashion writers still reference whenever her style choices as First Lady make news.

The couple welcomed their son, Barron, in March 2006. That same year, Melania became a naturalized U.S. citizen — a milestone that now gets cited constantly given her current status as only the second foreign-born woman to hold the title of First Lady.

A Multilingual First Lady Staying Put in New York

Melania’s fluency in six languages — Slovenian, English, French, German, Italian and Serbo-Croatian — set her apart even among a modeling world full of multilingual talent, and it’s a skill set that’s been referenced repeatedly since she moved into the national spotlight. Political spouses drawing this level of biographical curiosity isn’t new; profiles of other world leaders’ wives have followed a similar pattern of digging into the person behind the podium.

Rather than relocating to the White House the moment Donald Trump was inaugurated, Melania stayed behind at Trump Tower in New York so that Barron could finish out his current school year before making the move to Washington.