Who exactly is Charlene Davies, the Melbourne fashion icon with 1.7 million followers?

“For Charlene, life has been a relentless pursuit of something greater.”

Charlene Davies is here to work. It’s the last leg of her full-day photoshoot with Fashion Journal and we’re gathered at the final location in Brunswick, ready to finish off a very productive – yet strangely relaxed – day.

Charlene is a 43-year-old artist, model and the founder of jewellery brand, Culturesse. But if you took a cursory glance at her Instagram profile, you might mistake her for a wildly successful influencer. Her outfits are conceptual, her photos have a polished, editorial-like quality to them, and she partners with covetable labels like Jacquemus and Gentle Monster.

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A follower count of over 1.7 million, presumably there to observe her procession of street-style theatrics, only adds to the misconception. At the time of writing, Charlene’s recent posts include an umbrella adorned with real croissants, and a centipede-like outfit made from frothy pink tulle and aluminium ducting that wouldn’t look out of place at The Museum of Modern Art. Scroll back further and her looks become even more absurd.

One post shows a fully dressed table, replete with cutlery, crockery, glassware and napkins, worn around her neck to Australian Fashion Week. She says it took her close to 10 hours to make. With all those hours of arduous and unpaid labour in mind, one has to wonder, why?

“It is true that time is money. However, I don’t always quantify time with payment when it comes to doing something I thoroughly enjoy,” she tells me. “Seeing the idea in my head turning into reality is payment enough, especially when others also enjoy the results.”

When I meet Charlene today, she’s dressed head-to-toe in a lilac leather set sent to her by a Ukrainian label, Ciselés. It covers almost every inch of her body except for her hands, face and a small stretch of skin on her upper thighs – the gap where her thigh-high boots end and her mini skirt begins. A sheen of sweat covers her face – “It’s so hot today!” she exclaims – but it doesn’t deter her. She and the photographer, Lekhena Porter, who is shooting on film, discuss where to best position her.

It’s a contrast to Charlene’s usual process: one intentional ‘click’ with no instant gratification, rather than a barrage of iPhone photos to review on the spot. But she knows her angles, suggesting myriad poses around the space. Eventually, she picks up a gilded frame she’s sourced as a prop and puts it over her head. “How about I just carry this and have my arms stick out of it?” she suggests, positioning her torso half in, half out of it. It’s art, and it’s utterly Charlene.

Another photo on her Instagram catches my eye: a close-up of her face with colourful pieces of thread artfully tangled all over it. Her caption simply reads, “When bad sewing turned into art tantrums”. “It’s random, it’s self-pleasing – I don’t really care if people like it or say it’s weird,” she tells me.

In many ways, this unrestrained mentality defines Charlene’s approach to her work and life in general. Having grown up in Shanghai, being told she was ugly – “I didn’t look like those pretty little Barbie girls” – shaped her outlook on life in unexpected ways.

“Not being considered pretty meant I could have more fun with my poses, my photos and my outfits,” she says. “I’ve always loved taking candid photos, having an energy and mood to it, not necessarily posing and being all sexy.”

There’s nothing, from her unbridled honesty to her gestures, that classifies Charlene as anything other than original. Her Instagram bio says she’s “unclassifiable”, and after having spent just a few hours in her company, I’d agree. We meet again the day after the shoot, on a rainy Melbourne summer morning at Mammoth cafe in Armadale. Charlene bustles in, clad head-to-toe in tonal denim. She’s wearing a light blue midi skirt, split at the front, paired with a dark denim bustier and a cropped, voluminous bolero jacket.

She immediately insists brunch is on her. I wave her off, and we come to a standstill: let’s decide at the end. We both order poke bowls. “Poke is so amazing – the best poke bowl I ever had was in a small, shitty street in Paris,” Charlene says, laughing. Her demeanour is warm and engaging, her skin glassy against her curly black bob (I later find out her striking looks are due to her Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian genetics).

I ask her to tell me more about the fashion shoot, specifically the whirlwind of locations and corresponding looks she suggested to the Fashion Journal team. These saw her moving across Melbourne’s North and South, posing at a laundromat in Brunswick, outside a post office in Fitzroy and at the Tan Dai Asian Grocery in Richmond.

“I wanted to structure the shoot to reflect my life’s journey in Australia – I actually went through quite a hardship when I got here, aged 21,” she explains. “I met my now ex-husband online and I moved here from Shanghai, where I never felt quite at home. I was a baby, stupid and naive.”

Ambitious and creative, Charlene unwittingly walked straight into a traditional marriage where she felt the expectation to stay at home and provide family support for her children and in-laws. “I’m like, no, no, that’s not the life blueprint I see for myself,” she says. Eager to work, she applied for a job in early childhood education. “I researched the easiest job for someone in my circumstances to get, and it turned out to be childcare.”

As with everything, she threw herself into the challenge – toddler and husband in tow. The clincher for the marriage came when her first ‘luxury’ purchase was called into question: a black leather jacket from Jeanswest she’d spent months saving up for.

“It wasn’t a luxury brand, it was just a simple black jacket, and it was my own money in a joint account,” she recalls. “It was a really sad but also powerful moment for me. I thought, ‘Is this what my marriage is going to be like?’ I didn’t want that.” So, at the age of 23, she walked out. With the help of her parents, who alternated between living in China and Australia to look after her baby son, Charlene rented out a flat in Springvale and dreamt of making something of herself.

But it would be a long time before she became the creative force she is today (one who’s invited to fashion weeks globally, receiving invitations from the likes of Issey Miyake, Prada and Jean Paul Gaultier, to name a few). For Charlene, life has been a relentless pursuit of something greater, for both herself and her children.

As a single mother working full-time, her spare hours were spent at laundromats and Asian grocery stores to keep the household running. Somehow, she also put herself through a Master of Education and the International English Language Testing System, ultimately becoming a primary school teacher.

When her English test results were released, Charlene recalls the Catholic school she was working at praying for her. “They knew my story, and the morning the results were going to come out, the principal dedicated 10 minutes of prayer to ‘Miss Ye’,” Charlene says, her eyes welling up. “I was shocked. I was like, ‘What, for me?’. It’s a moment that I’ll never forget in my life.” Unsurprisingly, she aced the test.

Charlene has been met with similar moments of kindness throughout her life: from the commercial property broker who helped her find her first home so her son could have friends over for his birthday, to the supportive colleagues and managers who gave her career guidance.

Then, a meeting with her now-husband, Tim, opened up another door. A former eBay executive 10 years her senior, Tim introduced her to a world of travel that culminated in her next venture. “He asked where I wanted to go and I said Paris. I’d heard good things about it, I’d heard bad things, but I really wanted to see it.”

Inevitably, she loved Paris, but it was a chance visit to Lille, a tiny town on the border of France and Belgium, that she says changed her life. “My husband was taking candid photos of me walking around the side streets when we found this small jewellery store with all this beautiful Chinese embroidery,” she recalls. “I love earrings, but I don’t have pierced ears because they keep closing up. The woman there fixed one of the earrings into a clip for me so that I could wear them.”

On the long flight back to Australia, Charlene came up with a plan to start her own jewellery business, sourcing products from countries all over the world. Culturesse started with a small collection, sold via eBay, offering a unique service converting earrings for non-pierced ears. Over the years, trips to the post office became exponentially more frequent as Culturesse grew.

Marketing the brand online honed Charlene’s artistic eye, and pushed her to start experimenting with her own style. “Sometimes I have a specific theme in my head first… I then search Google, Pinterest, TikTok and my own wardrobe resources to refine the idea,” she says.

She’s the creative director and producer of every look she posts, roles that are demanding enough in isolation. But when elevated to Charlene’s calibre – requiring outfit concepts and materials, fittings and adjustments, location and transit planning, crew coordination, video script writing, content sequence planning and trend monitoring – her true capabilities emerge. She approaches fashion as a vehicle for artistic expression and not simply a reproduction of trends.

“To be honest, not many ordinary things catch my eye, I like to mix things up in unexpected ways,” she explains. It’s perhaps why she captured the industry’s attention before she’d even reached 2000 followers.

Assembly Label was the first to recognise her talent. “They direct messaged me, asking if I’d like some clothes to take pictures soon,” Charlene recalls. At first, she couldn’t believe it, why her? But, as with all challenges in her life, she embraced it and took the brief seriously, staging a days-long photo shoot in St Kilda.

“So I delivered all of these images to them, and they were overwhelmed,” Charlene laughs. “I remember their brand manager, Emily, saying they’d never, ever had people go to that much depth for a collab. So that started a few more collaborations with them, and they were very kind to me.”

Since then, her hard work and exceptional eye for the off-beat has led Charlene to enviable collaborations with luxury labels like Mulberry, Givenchy, Longchamp, Tory Burch, Rimowa and more. And while her personal style isn’t easy to pin down, Charlene looks to her star sign, Gemini, for inspiration. “My fashion label preferences are split into two halves. On the one hand I love modern, succinct and quirky designs by brands like Jacquemus, Coperni, David Koma and Kimhekim,” she says.

“On the other hand, I gravitate more towards a Y2K personality that has a forever-girly heart, and sometimes a dark gothic vibe. Brands that tick those criteria for me are Omighty and Rick Owens, and Australia-wise, I love Alemais.”

Anyone looking at Charlene’s career from afar would think she walked out of the womb into the world of high fashion. But she knows what it’s like to fight. While she may be comfortable today – “I no longer have to worry about financial security” – Charlene remembers the days when saving up for a leather jacket would take months of budgeting and sacrifice. “In life, you either sink or swim – and I chose to swim,” she says, smiling.

Special thanks to Beinart Gallery.

This article was originally published in Fashion Journal issue 196.

Keep up with Charlene here.