My best girlie in bali is another Charlie. Another English Charlie. Another English Charlie who ran away to Bali to take a chance and start something up. At the ripe old age of 24 she has opened a boutique backpackers hotel over here. She is a complete live wire, a mean poker player and a serious blagger. A couple of weeks back we thought it would be fun to play dress ups in our friends new clothing line ‘Mister Zimi’ and blag a free photo shoot in the flower markets and fabric dens of deep dark Denpasar.

The lovely photographer ‘Widi’ was happy to get involved. So at stupidly early o’ clock – with hands full of flat whites and faces full of make up – we hit up Bali’s ‘city’ streets. With temperatures hitting bikram levels and sunshine hitting our faces the make up started to melt pretty quickly. It wasn’t pretty. Certainly not glamorous. But is was absolutely hilarious. The locals thought it was major jokes and were totally up for being part of the pictures. Sate sellers, flower girls, balloon boys and fruit vendors all wanted to get into it. And did. One spice seller man wouldn’t get out of the camera [which was kind of annoying as his pose was way better than ours – proper model like and everything].

When our faces were practically melted off entirely, we decided it was time to find some shade and hit Jalan Sulawesi – the sartorial centre of Denpasar. The street is lined with deep little stalls crammed with all sorts of colourful rolls of fabric. Running over the busy street we jumped into one of said stalls for a bit of a costume change. Once again, at first, the local women thought we were crazy. But then soon were offering pins and styling the clothes. Classic. We headed towards the end of the street – to the shade and found a cool corner with some pretty light and this AMAZING cart. How wicked? Widi had to dodge some pretty serious traffic to take these photos but got some quite lovely shots – like this one.

I love how all the local women are dying to get into the shot too. Just casually hanging out. Legends. Such a fun day, and even funnier once we got the photos back… some really bad catalogue poses going on! Ridiculous. But fun.

 

Charlie is marrying her gorgeous fiance later this year [on her 25th birthday] and i’m really excited to plan her wedding at the beautiful clifftop villa ‘Bayu Sabbah’ in Padang Padang. It’s gonna be rocking. Just working on the colour scheme and styling now. Charlie rocks out a union jack helmet when she’s on the back of her boy’s bike, so kind of taking the vintage british flag as inspiration. Mixing it with some bombay blue and lashings of eccentric vivienne.

Obviously for the planning process 2 charlies wasn’t enough, so we’ve got a third in [my chef’s wife – Charlotte] just for good measure. You can never have too much charlie…