According to Richard Johnson with the New York Post [1], Melania Trump travels to NYC once or twice a month to go clothes shopping with her sister Ines Knauss.
“Instead of having clothes delivered to the White House, Melania has designers and stylists send them to Trump Tower,” an insider told the Post. “Once or twice a month, the first lady quietly comes to New York, and has her sister come over to give advice as she tries on outfits.”
Ines lives just a few blocks from Trump Tower in an apartment in a Trump building where Melania lived before she married Trump.
“She’s extremely private and publicity-shy,” said one source. “But she and Melania are very close.”
Ines once studied fashion and moved to Milan when Melania started modeling there. Ines also followed Melania to New York, when Melania signed with Paolo Zampolli, who introduced her to Trump.
Zampolli said, “The whole family has great style, starting with the mother.”
Melania’s spokeswoman said: “Mrs. Trump and her sister are very close, but she is not who helps her with styling her wardrobe. At the end of the day, it is Mrs. Trump who decides what she will wear.”
Knauss is a few years older than Melania and lived near the Trumps on Park Avenue.
Last year, the New York Post [2] referred to Knauss as “the older sister nobody knows” and Town & Country [3] called her the “secret sister.”
But for a member of the Trump family, the first lady chooses to be a lot more private online than, say, Donald Trump himself or his children. Despite her relative secrecy, Melania Trump still mentioned her sister in her speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016. The now-first lady said Knauss was “an incredible woman and a friend.”
According to the Express [4], Ines Knauss obtained her citizenship last year, around the same time Melania’s parents [5] obtained their citizenship.
The lawyer for Melania’s parents acknowledged that the Knausses had obtained citizenship via the very pathway that their son-in-law, the president, has so publicly denounced. Wildes called chain migration a “dirtier” way of characterizing “a bedrock of our immigration process when it comes to family reunification,” according to The New York Times [6].
In chain migration, parents of U.S. citizens are given priority. But siblings are much lower down on the priory scale. Yet Ines received citizenship, despite this fact, and despite the fact that she doesn’t hold a job. The Trump administration has been against immigration when the immigrant could potentially become a “public charge.”
Of course there are many questions [7] about how Melania received her visa when she originally moved to the US, as the first lady obtained the “Einstein” visa for “extraordinary ability.”
It’s reported that Ines Knauss is an “artist”. Melania Trump has previously shared her sister’s pencil-based sketches on Twitter. But searching for Ines’s art on Google brings up nothing, which leads me to believe she is not an actual working artist. So how did she get U.S. citizenship?
art of gossip #courtesy [8] of #artist [9] ines knauss pic.twitter.com/SnsQIJ1bWC [10]
— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) August 6, 2014 [11]
While we can’t expect everyone in Donald Trump’s orbit to be an enthusiastic Twitter user, it’s hard to stress just how little is known for sure about Knauss. In fact, the same half dozen or so facts about her are written into almost relevant every article.
Ines does have an open Instagram account [12], but it appears she only posts photos of Melania and Barron from gossip magazines.
There is this one photo of Melania taken in Paris when she was younger, but it doesn’t really look like her?
First, the New York Post confirmed via property records in 2017 that Knauss lived in a Trump Organization-owned Penthouse near Melania Trump. Town & Country reported that it’s the same building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that daughter and special adviser Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner lived in prior to their move to Washington, D.C. It’s unclear if Knauss still lives there now that Melania Trump has moved to Washington, D.C.
Next, she frequently shares vintage (the ’90s are now retro!) photos of Melania Trump on Facebook. After the New York Post published a get-to-know-her report on the first lady’s sister, she appeared to remove a few public posts, but some are still visible. Knauss’ Twitter account also seems to be private.
What is really impressive is that for all the professional photos of Melania Trump in photo services like Getty or the Associated Press, there seems to only be one of Knauss from 2005, seen here in Town & Country. In it, she’s pictured with her sister as well as Palm Beach philanthropist Audrey Gruss. “They are very close,” Gruss told the New York Post when they met at a fundraising event at Mar-a-Lago resort. “She struck me as a lovely person, and extremely creative.”
Speaking of Mar-a-Lago, CNN reports that Knauss served as Melania Trump’s maid of honor when she wed Donald Trump at the resort in 2005.
As Town & Country reported, the sisters were born with the last name Knavs and grew up together in Slovenia. They moved to Milan, Italy together in the early 1990s, where Ines wanted to break into fashion design while Melania was beginning to model – the career path that would lead her to meet her future husband.
“She really wanted to be in fashion but didn’t know how to break in,” Paris-based photographer Ale de Basseville told the New York Post. “Ines wasn’t like the other girls you would meet there, who behave like queens. She was really polite and very mellow.”
It’s a rare accomplishment to be in the Trump orbit and have so little publicity surrounding you, but Knauss has managed to retain a relatively large amount of privacy.