People of Ibiza: Patrick Cox

‘I was born in 1963 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, which is great place if you have interests in oil or cattle or skiing. Other than that, there's no reason to be there. My father was a linguist who had been born in the East End of London and my mother was a ballet dancer of Irish descent. At the age of two, my father’s work meant we moved to Nigeria and lived in Lagos for three years. From there we moved to Chad, where my father was studying languages: he speaks around 13 languages now. Later we moved to Cameroon. We weren't diplomats, but my father worked for the Canadian International Development Association, which was almost like the Peace Corps back then. I went to international schools where the American ambassador's kids were driven to school in a bulletproof stretch limousine. It was a very interesting childhood. When my parents divorced, my brother and I came back to Canada with my mom and my dad stayed in Africa. I buried myself in academia and I was a swot. Physics, chemistry, biology, math, French, English, German - that's what I did. I never did anything remotely artistic or creative because I’d had a very traumatic childhood for many reasons and when that happens you seek absolute clarity and control. You always want to know exactly where you stand, and for that you need yes or no answers.

I moved to Toronto at the age of 17 to take a break and and in the city I discovered fashion and being gay and dressing up and going to clubs. It was ‘81, ‘82 and I was obsessed by everything British: Vivienne Westwood, The Face, i-D. Steve Strange and Spandau Ballet and Culture Club. The Eurythmics and Duran Duran. I ended up being photographed in the local paper in my New Romantic outfit and I became the door whore at Toronto’s trendiest nightclub. That’s when I knew fashion was my future. By September 1983 I was living in London and had enrolled at Cordwainers, the shoe college. Cordwainers was unheard of then, but much later it became very fashionable thanks to the attention that the likes of myself, Emma Hope and Jimmy Choo conferred upon it. But in 1983 it was a backwater and I loved it! In my first year of college, I ended up doing the shoes for Vivienne Westwood's show in Paris. It was like a fairy-tale – it was New Year's Eve 83/84 and I'd been at the Camden Palace with Steve Strange and Boy George and all that sort of crowd. We left to go to a speakeasy in Soho called the Pink Pussycat. In the bathrooms I met the entire Vivienne Westwood World's End gang and they came over to me and said, ‘you’re that American boy that shops in our store.’ And I went ‘Canadian actually’. And they said ‘nerd, we think you're cool. You can hang out with us’. And that was it it. I was suddenly accepted. I was called in for a meeting with Vivienne herself shortly afterwards. She was my idol and there she was knitting a cardigan and I was wearing a crop top and my midriff was exposed. It was January and they had no heating in the studio because they had no money. And so she said, ‘oh, just put this on.’ At the end of the day, I tried to give it back and she said ‘no, keep it.’  It was literally a Westwood one-off. I sold it later in the nineties to Japanese collectors. 

I graduated in July 1985. I took a small stand - just two by three metres - at British Fashion Week and that was the beginning of everything.  Shoes weren't fabulous before then - people thought shoes grew on trees. When I told my mom I was being a shoe designer, she literally imagined me in a heel bar. She thought I was a cobbler. For the next two decades, life was wild. I sold millions of pairs of shoes. I reinvented the tubular moccasin -  I called them Wannabes - and sold them to Paul Weller, to Jazzy B, to every fashion-forward young person from London to Hong Kong. In the nineties I rode the Brit Pop wave, the Oasis brothers had my shoes in every colour. I was opening two standalone stores a year and I could do no wrong. Then, suddenly, the Prada group, the Gucci group, the Louis Vuitton group came out of nowhere and they were all making shoes. And all of a sudden, my competitor wasn't a lone person running their business, they were corporations. I couldn’t compete and I went off the rails, I couldn't leave the house, I was having  panic attacks. I had never had to question myself before because everything I did was successful. I didn’t need to love myself, because Vogue loved me and my bank balance loved me and it was all about external validation. I realised I just wasn’t happy anymore. I wanted a more organic life. I was drinking and taking a lot of recreational drugs and the disconnection between my heart and my mind was so extreme. So, I told the factories and the clients that it was over and I secretly came to Ibiza.

I knew friends that had bought places through Emme Gex and I called her and I saw 22 properties in three days. This one was the last one. I'd been coming to the island since ‘91, but always in the South. Always high. Always in Space. DC-10, Amnesia. I'd never been further north than maybe San Jose. There was this mythical north and it took me three years to get there! I thought San Juan was eight hours away. A friend came to stay with me once from Eastern Europe. He arrived at night. We spent five days partying. When we left at daytime together, he looked out the window of the plane and goes, ‘Oh! It's an island. There are beaches!’ Because I'd never shown him anything but clubs and drugs. I didn’t even go to restaurants. I'd just go to McDonald's every 48 hours. 

Around 2015, my straight married friends had started buying places in the north. Arthur Mornington and Gemma Kidd. Anton and Lisa Bilton. All these people were channelling a whole new Ibiza vibe and I went to stayed with them and I thought oh my God. This is beautiful. I'm not off my face. I'm not in clubs and I’m not going home panicking. There’s a spiritual side too. And that was great for me because I wasn't fully ready to move to the middle of nowhere but in Ibiza you can have feet in both camps. If you want to be doing blow and spending 50,000 euros on a table, you can. Or if you want to be naked on the beach and eat vegan food, you can do that too. Ibiza is its own little creation and that to me represented freedom. I thought I could move here and open an animal sanctuary and write my memoirs. One of my biggest regrets when I discovered drugs and clubs at the age of 17 was that I lost my connection to animals and nature. Up until then I was going to be a vet or a marine biologist, but I lost all that to disco. In Ibiza I realised that there's still time. There's this saying, that life is in two acts and it's about surviving the intermission. I was stuck in the fucking intermission for a decade and I couldn't figure out what I was going to do that was ever going to compare to being Patrick Cox in the nineties. And that’s when I discovered toad.

The Colorado River toad [bufo alvarius, also commonly known as bufo] secretes a venom that contains 5-MeO-DMT, which is then dried and smoked. I had tried ayahuasca a few times before rehab but it never really suited me. In Ibiza I met the man who would become my spiritual mentor, a Colombian guy named Cesar. He had been very sick but he’d changed his life by throwing himself into the medicine. He had a vision on toad that he needed to go to Mexico, where the toads are from, and spend the rest of his life as a facilitator. I first did toad with him in 2018. I had moved to Ibiza the year before and everything had gone completely wrong. My dog had died. The architect was ripping me off. The builder was ripping me off. I hated Ibiza, but worse, I hated me. Without all the distractions of London, the chickens had come home to roost. One day my friend said, ‘oh, this person's coming from LA serving toad. Do you want to be part of this?’ I had done zero research but I already knew what my answer would be. My life changed overnight. I now call my life pre-toad and post-toad. I sat up and I just went, what? Was the sky always this blue? Were the trees always this green? I never noticed because I was just in this funk, with a grey filter to my reality. 

I drove home the next morning and I got in the pool and I fell in love with my life all over again. It was the greatest gift I have ever given myself. While my teacher was alive, I saw him once a month for three years and I began to really appreciate being on my own in Ibiza with my animals, no distractions, nature, solitude. All the conditioning of my life, all of things I was told by my partners, my teachers, my parents - you're not worthy, you're ugly, you're fat, you're thin, you're whatever. It all dropped away and I could just be me. And in that space, away from all the noise of my career and my life and my ego, I found that I wanted to create again. I started to design a small capsule collection, inspired by my journey with psychedelics, although I prefer the word entheogen, which is from the Greek and means ‘to reveal the God within.’ I began with a few sweatshirts that I sourced internationally, either recycled or sustainable, and then had them embroidered here in Ibiza. I called the collection Doors of Perception, after the Aldous Huxley quote. Last year I sold out before Christmas. This year I added some more lines and I also stocked the pieces with my friend Daniela Agnelli at the Agora. It’s been a beautiful, slow and steady return to creativity. I'm working on a documentary too, called My Road to Toad, which touches on my childhood, my success and the inevitable loss of that success. At sixty, I can now look at my life story as an evolution. It’s about not feeding that ego anymore and not listening to all the noise. It’s about finding my creative truth and living from a place of the heart. Above all, it's about the long journey back home to me.’