Ibiza's Intelligent Change
Discover more from It's Not Sustainable with Tiffanie Darke
Ibiza's Intelligent Change
The progresserati embrace sustainable fashion whilst journeying into their inner selves. (Helped along by staying in the Mediterranean's most luxurious resort.)
I spent this weekend in Ibiza at the Intelligent Change summit, the latest meet up of progressive thinkers, wellness practitioners and renegade business types. The idea of the summit was to upend conventional wisdom and encourage us all to seek higher, smarter, kinder lives. It was indeed an awesome group of people: indigenous storytellers, sex therapists, meditation experts, futurists, poets, composers, architects, trainers and a whole crowd of investors looking for opportunities, and influencers - sorry! ‘Content Creators’ - looking to populate their social media feeds.
It was curated by Alex and Mimi Ikonn, the husband and wife duo who smartly rode the rise of social media with a plethora of businesses that allowed them to become the poster children for Tim Ferriss’s 4 hour work week. Sitting on a fortune, with not much work to do, the husband and wife duo were surprised to find that success didn’t necessarily lead to happiness, and set out on a quest to find out what did. This summit was a window into their work, (also designed to shine a light on the merchandise you can buy to help yourself on your journey, from Intelligent Change’s 5 Minute Journal to their Mindful Affirmations cards, to their, um, Face Oil).
The Ikonns showed up in my life last summer, when they wondered into the Six Senses Ibiza store, Agora, I run with Vogue Fashion Director Daniela Agnelli. They asked if we would like to stock their product. The books are beautifully made, with a conscious supply chain it’s hard to rival, and customers loved them. So much so, Alex and Mimi decided to hold the mother of all marketing events and organise a three day change summit.
They pulled it off, kickstarting the weekend with a talk about death and reminding us all of how much of the rest of our lives we have yet to live, so therefore better not dilly dally, and get on with transforming ourselves and the world around us. Luckily they served wine with this particular exercise.
Next came morning hikes, AI workshops, sunset cacao ceremonies, nutrition programs, sea swims (agh - jellyfish!), sound baths and mind-blowing speakers from Calm’s Michael Acton Smith to writer Neil Strauss to the formidable architect Thomas Ermacora. (If all this sounds like your cup of matcha tea, watch out for Alma Festival, same location, later this year).
Daniela and I got to tell our story about Agora, (Mimi is heavily into sustainable fashion), and many of the audience had fledgling fashion brands up their sleeves we were able to advise on. (First question: Do we need it? Is it better to have it or not to have it? If it’s the latter, don’t make it).
Then it was the turn of Arizona Muse, the activist and Dirt Charity founder who has made regenerative agriculture her specialised subject. Arizona asked me to share her stage, so I got to ask all the questions. Sometimes when you speak to people in the fashion industry, they find it hard to accept the gravity and knowledge with which Arizona undertakes her role - probably because she used to model, and people tend to underestimate models.
Let me dispel that. Arizona’s life has been a circuitous one. Discovered early on, she didn’t go to university, and an unexpected pregnancy at 19 meant she had to juggle her soaringly successful modelling career with single parenthood. She told me this weekend she could never say goodbye to her son when she went away on shoots, because it was too heartbreaking for both of them, so they used to record each other video messages instead, which they could play over and over.
She was soon shooting for Mario Testino, Patrick Demarchelier, Paolo Roversi and Steven Meisel, made the cover of American Vogue and walked for Chanel couture, but after a while she began to get curious. These clothes she was being asked to wear, where were they all coming from? No one on set could answer her. Not the stylists, the glam team, the photographer. “So I started to learn by Googling things, reading books and talking to people who were already talking about sustainable fashion,” she says. “I was pretty shocked about what I learned, especially as I began to understand the impact of the garments sector - which of course is not just the clothes that walk down the runway; it’s every single pair of shoes, handbag and jeans that has ever been made. That’s a whole load of toxic chemicals.”
They say with sustainability once you know, you know, and Arizona resolved to do something about it. She joined Extinction Rebellion, became an activist, and marched and campaigned and protested and talked and talked to anyone who would listen.
Meanwhile, her curiosity pricked, she began to follow the threads. She enrolled in the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership, (same course I took - cannot recommend it more highly), and went deeper into her learning journey. “What struck me was that everything led back to soil. Clothes, I discovered, are grown in soil, by farmers. Obviously, I knew the food on my plate was coming from farms, but it had not clicked that every single natural material, whether that’s cotton or hemp or silk or leather, has also been grown for us by farmers.”
Farming, she decided, was the answer. She spent time with farmers, worked on farms, and learned all she could about agricultural practise. (Her dream one day is to become a farmer, and on a tour of regenerative farm Tierra Massia this weekend, she passed round a serving bowl of soil for everyone to eat. “It’s fantastic for your gut! Full of micro organisms!” she exclaimed, swallowing it down.)
She also discovered that the suicide rate amongst farmers is the highest in the world, such is their battle against the increasingly unpredictable weather, rising costs of chemicals and lower yields as their soil degrades. But along the way, Arizona discovered the solution: regenerative farming. A pre-industrial practise that uses no pesticides, no chemicals, does not plough the soil and carefully manages livestock grazing, it actually sequesters carbon out of the atmosphere and puts it back into the ground. “Farming is essentially smart management of biodiversity,” she says. “It’s so complex and intellectually stimulating. The level of observation farmers have, their connection with soil and land and the planet, is so much to be admired. It really is the most amazing job and way of life.”
She learned how regenerative farmers can use observation and animal and plant techniques to relegate weeds, manage yield, naturally enrich the soil and ultimately create the most luscious fertile environment in which crops can thrive. She realised that if fashion crops - cotton, silk, wool etc - were farmed in a regenerative fashion, the process itself would be carbon negative. So all these fashion companies trying to tidy up their supply chain and measure their carbon impact, particularly in the tricky Scope 3 emissions sector, would have a solution.
“We are now working with Demeter, a certifying body which has seen great success certifying food and wine, to create 10 new certifications for the fashion industry for materials,” she says. “If we can set this up, it will be the biggest achievement of my life: we will have a sustainable fashion supply chain from the soil right up to the garment. Everything from the field, to the processing of that garment, including the human aspect of who makes that garment, to how you use that garment - no dry cleaning at all - and then how you dispose of it. Because what’s the best way to dispose of a garment? You give it to the microorganisms in the soil and they will eat it for you. But it can’t be toxic, you can’t put it on a compost heap if it’s been dyed with toxic dye or treated with toxic chemicals. So we are setting up a whole circular supply chain that is not causing any harm, and is in fact causing good things to happen all over the world.”
Her charity Dirt matches funders with regenerative agricultural projects around the globe. Her most recent match is with the jewellery brand Beabond (also an Agora brand), who have created a necklace the profits of which will go to fund a woman-led learning centre in Zimbabwe. “It’s created by indigenous people for indigenous people - local people know their community, land, people and history better than anyone. Let’s not tell people how to do things, but learn from them about how they do things.”
Arizona is not alone in settling on regenerative agriculture as a climate solution: Kering have just persuaded Inditex to invest €15m in their regenerative fund, and the first t shirts from the regenerative cotton farm Stella McCartney has been supporting in Turkey go on sale this summer. It takes three years to transition a farm to regenerative practise (which really isn’t that long), but that’s three years of under productive crops and financial fallout for farmers. Pangaia now produce some of their t-shirts and hoodies as ‘transition t-shirts’ to denote the fact the regenerative supply is incoming, and to guarantee the farmers custom while they make the change. Look out for the name on fabrication labels, and support it where you can.
It was a thrilling moment talking to Arizona this weekend, amongst such entrepreneurial giants as Chloe MacIntosh, Michael Acton Smith, Thomas Ermacora, Tony Fadell and artists as diverse as Londrelle, Prince EA and Sam Branson. But then it’s always interesting talking to people who have found their purpose in life. “Intelligence is changing,” as Thomas Ermacora said, referring to the large language models on the cusp of transforming our society. But so are we, the humans within society: “Every time you grow, we all grow. It’s an opportunity for collective growth,” he said. “This is a call to upgrade ourselves.”
“Find your own inner activist, we all have one in us,” urges Arizona. “The earth that we all share right now is in an absolute crisis. The earth needs us to pay attention.”
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Until next week,
Tiff
Ibiza's Intelligent Change
Can I suggest you interview actual farmers doing regenerative agriculture, not someone flitting around the edges with no skin in the game. Is she having to make payroll on a farm? I seriously doubt it.