Elyse Knowles: ‘I’m sick of proving myself to everyone’
INSTAGRAM made her famous, but The Block star Elyse Knowles insists there’s more to her than what you see on reality TV and social media.
Stellar
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ELYSE Knowles has not had phone reception for an entire week. On the day she meets with Stellar, she has just returned from a camping trip to the Murray River with her boyfriend. There’s been no Facebook, no phone calls — and, most importantly, no Instagram, the platform that helped her become one of Australia’s most recognisable faces.
Social media transformed this small-time model from Melbourne into a red-hot “influencer”, with all the perks and pay cheques that come with it; it also sealed the deal for the 25-year-old to appear on ratings powerhouse The Block last year, with her boyfriend Josh Barker. And it’s helped lift her modelling career to new heights: she’s now the face of Myer’s new fashion and beauty campaigns. But she is, she insists, far happier mucking around in the mud by the Murray than checking how many followers she’s gained. (For the record, they’re sitting solidly at 867,000.)
Yet in real life, as she sits down with Stellar in a cafe while wearing ripped jeans and minimal make-up, Knowles insists she is sceptical of social media. “These days I don’t need to showcase every element of my life,” she says. “And I’m happy I’m at that stage, because I’m so sick of proving myself to everyone: proving you have to be this kind of person or you have to look like this or you have to be in a bikini in every shot. It kills me!” She throws her hands in the air. “I don’t have to do that, no-one has to do that, but they think they do to get anywhere on social media. I don’t want it to control me like that; I want to control it.”
Later that day, Knowles will attempt to do just that by posting a shot of herself in a white shirt and underwear to announce the relaunch of her website. Knowles has had the type of success most Instagram influencers are aspiring to, says digital and social media strategist Tiphereth Gloria. “If these girls, and guys, have patron saints, it would be the Kardashian clan, famous for not much in the beginning, but now hugely successful with mainstream media productions, product lines, collaborations, modelling and real celebrity,” Gloria says.
“A direct relationship with their fans via social media is the key to all of this mania. Fans and followers are seen as a captive audience. And the more [they] obey the influencer, the more powerful they become. Being a model to start with, Elyse had a huge advantage over regular people, as she’s naturally photogenic. Her look is important. And you can see it get more evolved and polished over time.”
Knowles acknowledges her approach to social media is calculated hard work, not just spontaneous happy snaps. “It’s a business for me. I’ve used social media as a tool to get more awareness around me, my brand and who I am as a person. But now I don’t want to rely on it. I want to be bigger and better. I don’t need it. No-one needs it. It’s a love-hate relationship, really.
“We’ve got our phones stuck in our hand, scrolling through life. It’s my business so I need to spend time on it, but when I’m switched off, I’m switched off. When you look at your phone you just compare yourself to everyone and it makes you upset sometimes, seeing what everyone else is doing. You shouldn’t. You’ve just got to be happy with who you are and what you’re doing and be present.”
During the early ’90s, the era that inspired her Stellar shoot, Knowles was a newborn. But she has vivid memories of the decade she spent growing up in the Melbourne suburbs with her parents and two younger siblings, a tomboy who was into “trackie daks”. Upon reflection, she credits her mother for her later interest in fashion. “She did fashion at uni and she’s a good seamstress; I learnt to sew from her. She sewed all our clothes when we were young. She saved a lot of money doing that, and it’s her creative outlet. I think that’s where I got it from.”
By the time she was 10, her parents were driving her to casting calls; at 16, she had her first encounter with Myer. (“It was a lingerie shoot that went into the Herald Sun and I was like, ‘Yes! I’ve made it.’”) After high school she studied fashion and merchandising at university. Her parents don’t live far from the home she’s just bought with Barker, another fixer-upper they hope to hone their renovation skills on.
Signing on to last year’s season of The Block, the self-confessed “bogan” was intent on proving the critics wrong given many were asking whether the young couple had what it took. With the experience now behind her, Knowles admits the pressure took its toll.
“A couple of days before the start of filming, I had a freak-out and said, ‘No, I’m not doing it,’” she reveals. “It was a scary thing, going onto a television show where you have no control. On social media, you have control and, obviously, you put your best foot forward and always want to look your best. On TV, they can turn you into whatever character they want. I’ve been working so hard for so long, since I was 10 years old, on this modelling career — was this TV show going to destroy that? It did freak me out.
“But then Josh talked me back into it. He said, ‘This is a platform where people can see the real you. People can see your true personality, see your wackiness and how down-to-earth you are, the stuff that you can’t show on social media. Social media cuts out a lot of things. They can’t completely turn you into something you’re not.’ So I just went in there being myself and hoped to God they didn’t edit me in a way where I was a bitch or anything like that.”
Once the show started, she says, there was no more doubt. “We didn’t once think that we couldn’t do it. We always had the motivation to finish. And we wanted to just smash it, which was my competitiveness coming out.” Smash it they did: the young couple won the competition, took home $547,000 and raised their profiles: Knowles scored a coveted Seafolly gig, secured a starring role in Myer’s A/W ’18 campaigns, and will also walk in the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival next month.
Not only did the risk pay off, but she says it made her relationship stronger. “It’s a pretty big milestone to get through that together.” As far as other milestones go, she’s staying mum. “I love kids. I’m the luckiest girl alive, but I’ve got a few more missions to tick off before I have a family. I just know I’ll always end up in Australia, living on the beach where it’s warm. I’ve got my dog, Josh... and who knows what else down the track.”