The sandals are the part people keep coming back to.
Not heels. Not satin. Not anything a stylist picked out of a garment bag at six in the morning. Flat sandals, the kind you buy because you are going to be walking on old stone all day and you would like to enjoy it.
She wore them with a pale pink sundress, fitted through the bodice, loose in the skirt. Silver hair down and unstyled. Almost no makeup. Her engagement ring, and that was the jewelry.
That is what Paulina Porizkova got married in.
The photos went up on Instagram on Friday, July 10, 2026: Porizkova, 61, and Jeff Greenstein, 62, on the balcony of the place they were staying in Florence, kissing, laughing, squinting into the Italian afternoon like two people who had gotten away with something. He was in jeans and a printed shirt. Nobody was posing. That was rather the point.
“We have so much to share with you all, but at the moment we’re also trying to see all of our loved ones who traveled some distances to be here, and just enjoy our favorite place with our favorite people,” she wrote that week. “There will be lots more to come!”
For anyone who came of age in the eighties, the name lands before the picture does.
Paulina Porizkova was the face. Sports Illustrated. The covers. The Estée Lauder contract. She left Czechoslovakia as a teenager and became, in the span of about four years, one of the most photographed women alive. She has been looked at professionally since she was fifteen years old.
Which is what makes the sandals read the way they do. This is a woman who knows exactly how to be photographed, choosing not to be.
The man on the balcony writes television.
Jeff Greenstein is an Emmy winner, a writer and producer and director whose credits run through a solid decade of what America watched on a weeknight. “Friends.” “Will & Grace.” “Desperate Housewives.” “The Neighborhood.” If you have ever laughed at a sitcom in a hotel room at eleven at night, there is a reasonable chance he had something to do with it.
They met in early 2023. On a dating app.
She is entirely unembarrassed about this, and she brings it up often, because she thinks women her age have been handed a lie about what is still available to them. The lie says the door closed a while back and nobody told you. She met a man on her phone at 58 and married him at 61, in Italy, in a sundress.
He proposed in July 2025.
And then, because romance is one thing and the Italian civil service is another, the two of them spent roughly seven months feeding paperwork into a bureaucracy. Foreigners do not simply arrive in Florence with a ring and a good mood. There are documents. There are stamps. There are offices with particular hours. Seven months of it, for a ceremony that took a fraction of an afternoon.
They have a podcast together, “Twenty Good Summers,” named for the arithmetic that people in their sixties actually do in their heads at two in the morning. On it, Porizkova explained something about why she wanted the legal version and not just the romantic one. She wanted the right to unplug him. Marriage, in her telling, is handing someone the authority to make the decisions you will not be awake to make. That is not a joke about hospital equipment. That is what she thinks the paperwork is for.
To understand why a woman would want that badly enough to fight the Italian civil service for seven months, you have to go back to the first time she was somebody’s wife.
She met Ric Ocasek in 1984, on the set of a music video.
She was nineteen. He was the frontman of The Cars, the lanky one in the sunglasses, and the song was “Drive.” She is the woman in that video. Millions of people have watched them meet without knowing that is what they were watching.
They married in 1989. They had two sons, Jonathan and Oliver, who are now 32 and 28. They lived in a townhouse in New York. From the outside it looked like one of the ones that worked.
They separated in 2017, after nearly three decades of marriage.
They never divorced. The paperwork was in motion and unfinished, and they were still sharing the townhouse, still on speaking terms, still folded into each other’s daily life in the way that long marriages do not stop being just because someone moved a bedroom. She was the one who found him in September 2019. She was bringing him his coffee.
And then the will was read.
Ocasek’s will left her nothing. That was legal, and it was his right, and it is not the part that stayed with people. The part that stayed was the reason he wrote down. The document stated that even if he died before the divorce was final, Porizkova was “not entitled to any elective share” of his estate “because she has abandoned me.”
Abandoned him. In writing. To be read aloud after his death, in a room, by a lawyer, to the woman who had been bringing him coffee.
Under New York law the word was not decoration. A surviving spouse is normally entitled to a share of the estate no matter what a will says. Spousal abandonment is one of the narrow doors out of that. The sentence was not a feeling. It was a legal instrument, aimed with precision, and it worked well enough to cost her two years.
She contested it. It took until October 2021 to settle.
Her comment when it was over was six sentences shorter than anyone expected. “They were very fair,” she said. “They gave me what is mine under New York state law, and we’re done.”
That is the whole statement. No lawsuit theater. No interview tour about betrayal. Done.
What she did instead was write about it, and talk about it, with a bluntness that made her a slightly different kind of famous in her late fifties. Not the face anymore. The voice. She wrote about grief that arrives contaminated with rage, which nobody warns you about, because the rules say you get to be sad about a dead husband and they do not say what to do when you are also furious with him and he is not there to be furious at. She wrote about being widowed and abandoned in the same document. She posted photographs of her own face at 55, 57, 59, without the retouching that had been standard on her since 1980, and got called brave for it, which she found funny and a little insulting.
She was, by every visible measure, finished with the part of life where somebody stands next to you.
And then a dating app, in early 2023.
Here is what makes the sandals worth writing about. A woman whose first marriage ended with a legal document calling her an abandoner had every reason to never sign another one. The rational move, at 61, with grown sons and her own money and a settled estate behind her, is to keep the boyfriend and skip the courthouse.
She did the opposite. She went and got the hardest possible version of the paperwork, in a foreign country, in a language she does not speak, and it took seven months, and she wanted it anyway.
Not for a dress. Not for a party. For the right to sit next to him in a room someday and be the person allowed to decide.
There was no aisle in Florence. There was a balcony, a printed shirt, a pink sundress, loose silver hair, and a pair of flat sandals on old warm stone.
At 61, she started over. In sandals, because she planned on walking.
