‘I’m not a shaman – I just want to help people’: shoe designer Patrick Cox on his psychedelic toad a
Life and style | The Guardian
The celebrity shoemaker was a fixture of the 90s London scene, then after the collapse of his business – and his mental health – he found salvation from a very unlikely source ...
‘This morning in my garden I picked literally kilos of tomatoes. What am I supposed to do with kilos of tomatoes?!” asks Patrick Cox, once one of the most famous shoemakers in the world, as he drives me to his home in Ibiza, which he shares with his beloved pit bull, Titus. “It’s got solar panels and a well. So I’m pretty much completely off grid, which is the dream.”
Once, this would have been Cox’s nightmare. “Getting up at 5am to do the gardening? When I was 30, I’d have been like: ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?!’” he says, and makes one of his bend-forward-at-the-belly big laughs. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, Cox, now 59, was shoemaker to the moneyed – through his high-end Patrick Cox line – and the masses, with his cheaper, mega-selling brand Wannabe, whose chunky loafers became the defining footwear of the era. Spindly stilettos by Manolo Blahnik might have made more appearances on Sex and the City, but at their peak Wannabe loafers sold 1m pairs a year. Cox’s handsome, impish face was frequently photographed at all the A-list parties. He was Elizabeth Hurley’s plus-one on the red carpet, best friends with Elton John and David Furnish. “I was the last one every night to hang up my disco shoes,” he says. He wasn’t nicknamed Party Pat by Janet Jackson for nothing.
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