The veteran shoe designer is back in business on his own terms, with an Ibiza-born, slow-fashion label, a Notting Hill pop-up and a joy-first growth plan.The veteran shoe designer is back in business on his own terms, with an Ibiza-born, slow-fashion label, a Notting Hill pop-up and a joy-first growth plan.
LONDON — Patrick Cox is a shoe designer again, something he said with equal parts surprise and satisfaction at the four-day pop-up of his Ibiza-based, psychedelics- and mental health-focused brand Doors of Perception in his former London neighborhood of Notting Hill.
“There’s a saying, life is in two acts. It’s about surviving the intermission. I got kind of stuck on the intermission for about a decade,” said Cox, who left his namesake brand in 2007 after more than two decades with 200 employees and 10 stores worldwide at its peak.
The end of that chapter, he admitted, was “all very sad” and felt like “unfinished business.”
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“My teacher at the time said the only way you’re truly going to be happy is if you reconnect with your creativity. He’d seen that if people talked about shoes or fashion, I’d get up and walk out of the room. I had to make peace with it, and I had to do it on my terms,” Cox said.
Those terms now are defined by Ibiza, entheogens and a deliberately small business.
Cox moved to the Spanish resort island in 2017 and began working with psychedelics, which he credited with helping him sort out his mental health and rethink his priorities.
The name Doors of Perception came from the Aldous Huxley book written on mescaline, a nod both to Cox’s entheogenic interests and to his own shift in worldview. “It’s about changing your perception of life, which is what I was trying to do in my late 50s,” he added.
The label started with a sweatshirt covered in 40 embroidered eyes, each of which took an hour to stitch by hand on Ibiza.
“I gifted it to one of my close friends, Elizabeth Hurley, at Christmas. She went upstairs, her son took a picture, came downstairs and gave it to me. That was my first post for Doors of Perception [and] because it was Elizabeth, it went from like 40 followers to 800 in 10 minutes,” Cox recalled.
From there, the brand evolved into what Cox knows best: footwear.
Living in Ibiza, he was already in Birkenstocks “morning, noon and night.” So he decided to create a Birkenstock-style sandal with hand-cast eye buckles, produced in a factory in Italy, where he had longstanding contacts from his previous career.
A small newspaper feature story later helped him sell about 100 pairs of what he called Four Eyes sandals on preorder, and the momentum has been growing from there. Cox said last summer he sold more than 500 pairs of them.
From there, he added a closed-toe mule in suede with psychedelic mushroom embroidery for the winter season, and similar styles on a polyurethane clog sole in denim and suede, all of which were available at the four-day pop-up on Kensington Park Road, with prices ranging from 165 pounds to 265 pounds.
Cox shares the space with Kalita, the resortwear label founded by Kalita Al Swaidi, whose grandfather, Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, was the prime minister of Iraq between 1929 and 1950. Her father later left Iraq during the 1958 revolution due to the family’s ties to the monarchy.
For the pop-up, the two brands teamed up on a limited run of dresses embroidered with Cox’s signature eyes, retailing for 700 pounds, which have already sold out.
Cox said sales are 70 percent U.K., around 20 percent U.S., with the rest scattered globally. Distribution is largely DTC, plus a handful of personal relationships, such as the Agora boutique at Six Senses Ibiza and a regular Gstaad pop-up in the winter.
The London event was the first time he has taken a straightforward shopfront rather than relying on private trunk shows in clients’ homes.
While the brand is gaining traction, Cox said he has no interest in taking external investment and scaling it as he did before.
“Yes, I want to grow, but small and organically. Bigger doesn’t mean better, and it certainly doesn’t mean happier,” he continued. “Right now, I do what I want to do. We don’t follow the fashion system. We do drops. This brand, Doors of Perception, is what I’m doing. It’s all about quality of life. What I do actually brings me joy. If there’s not time for me almost every night to be with my dogs and walk them, then why am I doing it?”
