The Way We Are: a love letter to the island we call home
Ibiza’s visual and spiritual identity is a kaleidoscopic collage of history, tradition and culture. L'OFFICIEL IBIZA's Editorial Manager Maya Boyd, who has lived on the island for many years, weaves Ibiza's complex stories into a modern editorial manifesto.
From the Moors and Catalans in 1235 to the hippies and payeses in the 1970s, this relentless jostling of custom and tradition has left Ibiza with a layered visual identity.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON. The dusty lane to the settlement of Baláfia has absorbed the midsummer rays and a heavy, sultry heat hangs low in the air. Cicadas drone, crackling like electricity among the jasmine and palms. Desiccated earth from the camino coats the prickly pears, dull pink and matte like setting plaster. Onwards, upwards, past the honey-hued farmhouses and creeper-clad courtyards, clustered childlike around their squat stone towers. A primitive cross - slaked in white paint - hovers above a tiny window, warding off a long-forgotten enemy. Descend the steps of a whitewashed well, into the belly of Ibiza. Cool and supple and secretive. Old as the sky and older still. Outside once more, blinded by the ice-white sun. A road, a school, a Land Rover, the terrace of La Paloma. Green juice and falafel salad, a nod to Ibiza’s Arabic history. Slender women in Vita Kin kaftans and Ancient Greek sandals, nut-brown children playing Lego in the dust. Scattered conversations in five different languages – cryptocurrency and NFTs; modern art and micro-dosing. At a blue painted table, an old woman shells almonds in the shade. On the lane outside, an ancient tractor rolls by, loaded with a harvest of olives. Two worlds colliding, co-existing, co-creating. Each intent on honouring this indefinable slice of Spain.
Contradictory as it may seem, this narrative of duality is far from new in Ibiza. Right from the get-go the island – and in particular its aesthetic – has been honed by the clashing of cultures. From the Moors and Catalans in 1235 to the hippies and payeses in the 1970s, this relentless jostling of custom and tradition has left Ibiza with an intricately layered visual identity that defines it to this day. In 1972, when Armin Heinemann and Stuart Rudnick, the accidental visionaries behind the now legendary Paula’s Boutique, took over a dilapidated storefront in Ibiza Town’s then-gritty Dalt Vila, they unwittingly came to define the paradoxical style that would be associated with Ibiza forevermore. ‘Beads and bells and kaftans and chiffon’, as Patsy Tilbury, mother of the make-up artist Charlotte, once put it. This naively bohemian mishmash of trinkets gathered on the hippy trail (itself a near-replica of the ancient incense trading route), paired insouciantly with an oversized esparto basket and pair of Ibicenco espadrilles, became the aesthetic of the island. It is a look that would go on to influence designers as diverse as Yves Saint Laurent and La Double J and seal Ibiza’s infamy as the island where – as the writer Clifford Irving once put it – ‘anything goes’.
Today the future of Paula’s is in the hands of fashion behemoth Loewe, whose revival of the brand in 2017 has led to the championing by Loewe of other local crafts, such as the ceramics of Laura de Grinyo at Ladio. In social terms, the revolutionary spirit of Paula’s is perhaps being best upheld by Annie Doble, whose eponymous Annie’s Ibiza boutique – also in Dalt Vila – dresses the likes of Kate Moss and Giovanna Battaglia Engelbert in glittering vintage, feathers and couture. While not perhaps as reactionary as it once was, Ibiza’s style – and lifestyle – is still influenced by the social and structural values of its adopted citizens. Driven by an international community to whom mainstream values and materialism are largely outmoded, Ibiza has become a sort of global exemplar of a new paradigm of modern living. Largely decentralised – in part thanks to the native population’s historic self-sufficiency – modern society here revolves around shared values as opposed to established structures. Organic food, renewable energy, child-initiated education and low-impact living are the pillars of the new world. Sound healing, plant ceremonies and ancient future techniques are the new medicines. Naive as it may sound, it appears that everyone from Harvard professors to neuroscientists to indigenous tribal elders agree that Ibiza is at the vanguard of a new school of planet-centric thought.
In the wild interior of the island, classic Ibicencan fincas - the white, cuboid houses that gave Ibiza its ‘White Island’ sobriquet, dot the landscape in their hundreds. Primitive and rudimental to behold, they are in fact direct copies of houses found across the Near East for thousands of years. When the architect Rolph Blakstad first began to study the origins of Ibiza’s vernacular architecture in the 1950s, he declared it to be: ‘part of an organic, living relationship between man and nature’. The Austrian Dadaist Raoul Hausmann declared it ‘architecture without an architect’.
When society photographer Slim Aarons photographed the hostess and fashion designer Viscountess Jacqueline de Ribes in Ibiza in 1978, it was a photograph taken on the steps of her finca that became the enduring image of the shoot. Fast forward 50 years and you are as likely to find an Israeli chef or American financier living in a casa payésa as you are a local farmer, with new priorities redefining these ancient spaces for contemporary living. One finca might host a yoga class, another a star-studded supper club for Gucci. The locals just shrug and say: ‘Live and let live.’ The term 'tolerance' is often thrown around when describing Ibiza’s ability to absorb new influences, but I wonder if perhaps it’s just that thousands of years of invasion have left the Ibicenco people with such a well-defined sense of their own noble identity that they don’t feel threatened by outsiders.
The Ibicenco people have such a well-defined sense of identity that they don't feel threatened by outsiders.
Down on the beach at Pou des Lléo, a new kind of collective is converging. Models, musicians, cooks and creatives, they’re the long-haired rebel youth of Ibiza’s old-timers. Jana Sascha Haveman and Laura Castro Poorta, founders of the fashion brand De La Vali. The models Felix Radford and Cara Delevingne. Photographer Indiana Petrucci and make-up artist Sofia Schwarzkopf-Tilbury. This cosmopolitan crowd flit with ease between Ibiza and London, Paris and Mexico City, swapping gallery openings in LA and fashion shows in Milan for lazy sunsets in this crumbling cluster of fisherman’s huts, where they’ll joke in three languages and reminisce about summers growing up on the island’s wild northern beaches. They’ll watch the ageing fishermen putt-putt out to sea as the sun sinks low, handmade nets tossed from the back of wooden fishing llaüts. By night they’ll hole up at San Carlos’s Bar Anita, to eat tapas at rickety wooden tables where the paper placemats are scrawled with island maps. There’ll be bitter green olives and shots of hierbas and the old men at the bar won’t raise an eyebrow.
