Inside Melania Trump’s modeling career from European start to American visa issues.Cau

Melania Trump might be a former first lady, but before she was Melanija Knav.

The 54-year-old was born in Slovenia in what was formally Yugoslavia. She then went on to have a successful decades long modeling career.

She’s opened up about her life and modeling career in her new self-titled book, Melania. Before meeting her husband, Donald Trump, and being one of the first models signed to Trump Model Management in February 1999, she had created her own career path.

At 16 years old she was discovered by a photographer in her home country named Stane Jerko. When she was 18, she signed to RVR Reclame, a Milan modeling agency.

She changed her name to Melania Knauss as her modeling career took off. In 1992 she was a runner-up in the Look of the Year contest ran by Jana Magazine.

After traveling around Europe as she modeled, she made Paris her home in 1994. She lived there with Victoria Silvstedt, a Swedish model who won Miss World Sweden the year before.

In 1996 she moved to New York City at the urging of modeling agency owner Paolo Zampolli. She lived with photographer Matthew Atanian near Union Square and her rent was taken out of her paychecks from Zampolli.

A year later, she modeled naked for Max, a French men’s magazine, and wasn’t paid as she was promised exposure to bigger magazines. The photos reemerged in 2016 when her husband ran for president.

Melania recently released a memoir, where she shared that in Europe she was raised with a more open perspective on nudity She said her photos were “artistic and tasteful” and posing nude in the fashion world was “commonplace and hardly scandalous.”

Her modeling career has been the center of controversy in terms of how much work she did in the United States before she was allowed to. In 2016, the Associated Press obtained documents that the model was paid $20,056 from 10 modeling gigs seven weeks before she was legally approved to do so.

Melania has hit back against this, writing on X, formally known as Twitter: “I have at all times been in full compliance with the immigration laws of this country. Period. Any allegation to the contrary is simply untrue.”

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