"Being a wife is a full-time job. Every day is a working day," she confided to the magazine during one of those exhausting days at the couple's house in the Cap d'Antibes. "After all, we have three houses in three countries, and I chose every chair and plate."
Melnichenko isn't a household name, even though her husband Andrei is the 24th-richest man in Russia. She is a former model and singer from Serbia who used to be called Sandra Nikolic. Her 36-year-old husband is big in fertilizer and Siberian coal and was worth $6.2 billion when Forbes last counted. He also has his own hair and looks nice with a tan and bare feet in a photo of the couple's wedding in the South of France. So Alexandra is one lucky woman.
Her name rang a bell, because a colleague once sent around a link to her web site, Aleksandramelnichenko.com. What I liked about the site is that it doesn't seem to have any promotional purpose but simply shares details of her lovely life. The sections cover her various interests: fashion, music, travel, her husband and her dog Vala.
The small, white dog is depicted on the site lounging by a pool. The accompanying text explains that Vala has visited Antarctica and the Himalayas and managed to set her paws in 40 countries in her first year of life. The jet lag probably explains her rather dazed expression in the Tatler photo shoot.
At first glance, the music section of the web site looks like a list of her pop idols: Whitney Houston, Jennifer Lopez and Enrique Iglesias. But these people aren't just in Alexandra's CD collection; they have all come around and given personal concerts in her house.
The Tatler interview reveals more intriguing details. When Andrei and Alexandra got married, the guests didn't have to worry about their outfits. On arrival at their hotel, all 300 guests were given an Armani dress or suit. "It was to save our close friends from extra expenses," Alexandra told the magazine.
But it's the photo shoot that really tells the story. Alexandra poses barefoot next to her gold-mosaiced pool, idly dipping her fingers in the water. You could at least comfort yourself that she's wearing borrowed clothes, but Tatler writes that her husband noticed that she got her Christian Lacroix dress slightly wet and insisted on buying it.
Alexandra's husband is clearly only too happy to show off his beautiful wife, and he's not the only one. Magazine publisher Sergei Rodionov is famous for paying for nude photo shoots of his wife Olga, although he doesn't get as much flak from the Russian press from this as you might expect -- possibly because journalists envisage sending him a resume at some point. Nevertheless, she told Komsomolskaya Pravda that her "Book of Olga," where she reveals genital piercings in photographs by Bettina Rheims, did not go on sale in Russia on her request. Then there's the most famous billionaire partner of them all, Darya Zhukova, the girlfriend of Roman Abramovich who made American Vogue's "most stylish" list last year.
If you've got what it takes, Tatler prints a list of Russia's most eligible bachelors. Not surprisingly, the list contains a lot of exceedingly rich businessmen and is topped by spindly playboy Mikhail Prokhorov -- worth $22.6 billion according to Forbes. But there are also a few photogenic wild cards including 25-year-old Mikhail Stroyev, who wears a skull earring in his picture and is described as a model and yacht dealer. He would probably look nice next to the gold-mosaiced pool.
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