Help is at hand for Peristera Batziana, a media-shy electrical engineer and mother-of-two, who, as the long-time partner of the new Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, suddenly finds herself bathed in the unwelcome spotlight of worldwide media attention.
Anticipating, perhaps, that the one-time left-wing student firebrand might be struggling to come to terms with her new role as Greece's first unmarried first lady, Vogue magazine has sashayed forward with some helpful advice.
Under the headline "What Greece's new first lady should wear", Vogue's celebrity-style-watcher Edward Barsamian this week suggested her "ideal wardrobe" should be "one full of options in a refined palette and sharp tailoring".
Noting sniffily that Batziana “appears to embrace rich colours and bold prints” – so last decade, darling – Barsamian suggests “several key pieces from the pre-fall collections to refresh her wardrobe”, of the kind preferred by the likes of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, no less.
Now, not much is known about Batziana, who has kept a determinedly low profile for her and her two children, almost never being photographed, throughout her partner’s successful election run.
But only someone who knows nothing of world politics – a fashionista, perhaps – could even dream that Batziana might aspire to looking anything like Merkel, her partner’s newly acquired political nemesis.
And it’s a fair assumption that the woman who, as a student, is widely believed to have steered Greece’s future prime minister far to the left of his bourgeois background, would rather be seen dead than in any of the ludicrous, and ludicrously pricey, proposed outfits from Marni, Balenciaga or Alexander McQueen.
The world’s media is scrabbling to bring itself up to speed on Batziana – “The woman behind the Greek who makes Europe tremble”, as one Greek newspaper described her, but about whom very little has been written, beyond the charming fact that Tsipras calls her Betty.
And, says Yorgos Dardavillas, the press attaché at the Greek embassy in London, “there’s not been much written about her in Greece, either”.
To be fair, Greek embassies around the world, and the Greek media, have rather more on their mind at the moment than delving into the background of the partner of their new anti-austerity leader.
“At the moment, the political aspect of the whole thing is more important than issues like that,” says Dardavillas.
Besides, Batziana has, he adds, “had a very low profile … she has been seen out in public with him only a couple of times in semi-official circumstances”.
Whether she will, as some European newspapers have inevitably speculated, prove to be the power behind Tsipras’s throne, remains to be seen.
“I have heard this expression, ‘Behind every great man is a great woman’, uttered about this situation,” says Dardavillas. “But I cannot speculate, because I just do not know. She is not a new entity only to the world.”
There’s also the unresolved question of the diplomatic etiquette regarding the official role and status of Greece’s first unmarried first lady.
“She is not, in a sense, the first lady, because they have not married,” Dardavillas says.
It hasn’t been an issue for Greek voters, more concerned with Tsipras’s commitment to throwing off the undignified shackles of Europe-imposed austerity.
Besides, adds Dardavillas, “from what I know about Tsipras and his life over the past few years, I don’t think such issues will be in the forefront of his mind.”
Batziana and Tsipras are both atheists. On Monday, the new prime minister became the first modern holder of the office to reject a blessing from the head of the Greek Orthodox Church.
The man from the embassy offers one last titbit: the name Peristera means “dove”. A good omen, perhaps, for Merkel and the Euro banking elite, who will be hoping her leftist partner comes bearing an olive branch, rather than a road map for Greece’s exit from the eurozone.
Whatever Batziana’s influence on her partner’s decisions in office, it’s thought that it was she who shaped Tsipras’s political beliefs when he was a young man.
Various sources say that Batziana, 40, was born in 1974 in Karditsa, a city north-west of Athens, in the Thessaly region. Both she and her partner have – so far, at least – been successful in their ambition to keep their private lives private, and nothing much is known of Batziana’s parents or background.
More details, however, have emerged from her school days. Batziana and Tsipras, who are believed to have met at high school in the central Ampelokipoi district of Athens in 1987, are childhood sweethearts who have now lived together for the past 20 years.
According to the Greek Reporter, at a time when students were protesting against educational reforms and occupying school premises, Batziana and Tsipras joined the Greek communist youth party.
“The students took over their schools, living and sleeping inside them for weeks,” the magazine reported in 2012. “Alexis and Peristera were among the leaders of the movement.”
Indeed, some reports credit Batziana with having radicalised Tsipras, drawing him away from his middle-class background – his father ran a successful building firm.
After leaving school, they both studied engineering at Athens’ National Technical University, after which Batziana went on to graduate in electrical engineering from the University of Patras.
One story circulating from that period is that she took a professor to court to defend her doctoral thesis.
Today, the couple have two sons, Phoebus and Orpheus, and the latter’s middle name – Ernesto – is said to be a tribute to the Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara, his parents’ one-time hero.
In 2012, the Greek publication Queen claimed Batziana was the source of the couple's insistence on privacy, and their few appearances together in public.
"Those who know the couple claim that Betty is why little is known about their relationship," Queen reported. "She in no way wants to expose even the slightest detail of her personal life in the media."
Nevertheless, the Greek Reporter insists that Batziana's low profile should not be attributed to timidity or mistaken for a lack of depth: she's a "tough cookie … not the low-key, calm woman everyone sees at first glance".
As in her radical youth, she remains “strong-willed, militant and dynamic”. Not interested in shopping, “she doesn’t pay regular visits to the hairdressers and doesn’t spend money on clothes”.
Back in 2012, Queen put it even less tactfully: "Thoroughly scruffy," her personal style was "more casual and sporty than sophisticated".
But the couple has brought something even more unusual than a lack of conformity to the Greek political scene – long-term love and fidelity.
A few years ago, one Greek newspaper noted that the “image, rhetoric and clear leftist philosophy” of the leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left had inspired the media to dub him the new Andreas Papandreou, “who in his early days occupied Tsipras’s place at the left-centre of the Greek political scene”.
Yet there’s a significant difference between Tsipras and Papandreou, which was “neither political nor philosophical”.
While Papandreou had been “a restless womaniser with a string of marriages and divorces”, Tsipras “has stayed faithful to his high-school sweetheart for the past 20 years”.
Until now, Batziana and Tsipras have lived in a humble, low-rise block of flats in a rundown, working-class area of Athens. But no longer.
Like the mother of his children, Tsipras eschews bourgeois concerns about appearances – not for nothing is he known as the Rebel Without a Tie. But, in the palatial surroundings and trappings of the Maximos Mansion, the plush official Athens residence of the Greek prime minister, both may now have to raise their style game.
Who knows – Red Betty may yet be grateful for Vogue's fashion advice.
weekend@thenational.ae