use of Encoding()?

Hey,

this is my first question here, so forgive me if i my be clumsy.

I want  to use Encoding to set the encoding of a character vector, but
it doese not seem to work. See example.

x <- "16-03-02"
Encoding(x)

[1] "unknown"

Encoding(x) <- "latin1"
Encoding(x)

[1] "unknown"

Is this intended?
Actually i want to change encoding of a character vector generated by
list.file on a linux computerwith UTF-8 file encoding, rstudio encoding
is iso8859-15.
Any hints?

best Tilmann