There is a particular kind of cognitive whiplash that comes from watching a couture dress get translated onto the hull of a 30-knot electric raceboat. On 28 May, in the harbour of Ibiza Old Town, that is precisely what happened – and somehow, against a backdrop of several hundred cobalt-blue gin bottles, it made total sense.
The occasion was a showcase staged by Bombay Sapphire and the E1 World Championship, the world’s first all-electric raceboat series. E1 had arrived in Ibiza fresh from its Lake Como Grand Prix, where Will Smith’s Team Westbrook took the win – because yes, this is a sport in which the team principals are A-listers. E1’s owner roster reads like a Vanity Fair seating chart: Will Smith, Tom Brady, LeBron James and Rafael Nadal among them. If you have ever wondered what the great and the famous do with their money once the yachts get boring, the answer is apparently electric boat racing.
But the genuinely interesting story in Ibiza wasn’t the celebrity ownership. It was the boat itself – and the woman who dressed it. Annie Doble, the founder of cult Ibiza label Annie’s Ibiza and a London Fashion Week favourite, unveiled a bespoke RaceBird livery inspired by one of her signature pieces, The Mercer Dress. The result was E1’s first-ever fashion collaboration, a meeting point between a designer who works in silk and a championship that works in lithium.
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E1 framed the partnership in suitably lofty terms on its Instagram; “Two designers from completely different worlds, brought together in Ibiza,” the series wrote. “Introducing E1’s first ever fashion collaboration – a bespoke Championship E1 RaceBird livery designed by Annie’s Ibiza, alongside Sophie Horne, designer of the E1 RaceBird. Where fashion, craftsmanship and electric performance meet.”
What makes this worth more than a passing scroll is the quiet gender story underneath it. Motorsport – even the electric, sustainability-forward kind – remains overwhelmingly male, both in the cockpit and in the design studio. A collaboration that puts a female fashion founder in conversation with the female engineer behind the raceboat is a small but pointed corrective.
Doble said as much in her own post; “Omg an Annie’s racing boat!” she wrote. “Loved having the opportunity to design my own E1 RaceBird… For someone who loves being on the water, it was such a fun experience to see one of my designs brought to life on an E1 RaceBird and out at sea at the E1 showrun Ibiza 2026.” She went on: “I loved having my favourite gin and tonic cocktails with Bombay Sapphire whilst meeting Sophie Horne, the incredible designer and engineer behind the RaceBird itself. It was inspiring to bring together two very different worlds of design and to celebrate female creativity.”
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The eco-friendly technology is the part that should pull us in, even if you have never watched a boat race in your life. The RaceBird is fully electric, and E1’s wider pitch is built around ocean conservation as much as competition. Doble clocked it. “What I love most about brands like E1 and Bombay Sapphire are their commitments to innovation and sustainability,” she wrote. “From the fully electric boats to its wider mission to help protect and restore our oceans, E1 feels like a genuinely exciting glimpse into the future.”
It would be naive to pretend this wasn’t, at its core, a beautifully art-directed brand activation. There were striking blue bottles catching the sun, a roll call of recognisable faces – Douglas Booth, AJ Odudu, Bella James, Doble herself with friends Laura Castro and Kim Troxler – and the inevitable announcement of a new tie-up, this time between Bombay Sapphire and Steve Aoki’s Aoki Racing Team. Guests sipped serves at ROTO, the waterfront restaurant overlooking the harbour, climbed into cockpits and tested themselves on E1 simulators. This is what a modern launch looks like: equal parts party, press moment and product demo.
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And yet the underlying proposition is a real one. Electric racing is a genuine technological frontier, and the decision to introduce it to a fashion-literate, design-obsessed audience through couture rather than horsepower is a smart piece of cultural translation. For a generation of women who were never the target market for traditional motorsport, a raceboat wearing a dress is a far more effective invitation than any lap time.
Ibiza, a place built on the collision of art, music and excess, was the right stage for it. The future of the sport, E1 keeps insisting, lives in the moments around the race rather than the race itself. On the evidence of one sun-drenched afternoon in the Old Town, the brand may be onto something.
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