There’s a feeling I get when I encounter something truly iconic.
It’s a kind of mind-smile. A tiny internal ‘Ohhh. Of course.’
I’ll see an interior and know it’s Kelly Wearstler before I’ve checked the credit. Pamela Anderson will collaborate with Flamingo Estate and I’ll think, of course she did. Jonathan Anderson can turn a tomato into a clutch bag and somehow make the whole thing feel intellectually inevitable.
There’s something deeply satisfying about that level of clarity.
But also something I truly envy.
Imagine knowing who you are so completely that everything you touch carries a level of your DNA that even strangers on separate continents can feel your essence.
I’ve spent almost two decades thinking about brands, identity and what makes things distinctive, so theoretically I should understand what’s happening here. But lately I’ve found myself becoming slightly obsessed with a bigger question:
What does it actually take to become iconic?
Not successful. Not famous. Not cool.
Iconic.
(Because they’re clearly not the same thing.)
There are enormously successful companies with almost no cultural gravity. There are famous people whose names everyone knows but who don’t really stand for anything. There are beautifully designed restaurants, hotels, products and brands that I admire but could swap for another beautifully designed thing tomorrow without feeling any particular sense of loss.
Icons are different.
They seem to shine like their own star in the sky. You know them when you see them.
So naturally, I’ve been trying to work out why.
My current research pool is admittedly chaotic.
Pamela Anderson in midlife.
Gwyneth Paltrow.
Jimmy Butler.
Martha Stewart.
Kelly Wearstler.
Miley Cyrus.
Wes Anderson.
Then there are the brands and places: Rhode, Nike, Lore, Erewhon, Miu Miu, Chateau Marmont.
On the surface, these things have almost nothing in common.
A basketball player and an interior designer. A supermarket and a hotel. A filmmaker and a skincare brand.
And yet I feel the same gravitational pull towards all of them.
There is a world there.
That word keeps coming up for me: World.
Because I don’t think iconic people and brands simply make things.
They create worlds.
And eventually those worlds become so well resolved that you can recognise them from the tiniest fragment.
A colour, silhouette, sentence. An interior. A photograph. An attitude.
Or dare I say it, a smoothie.
You don’t need the logo anymore.
You just know.
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This is perhaps why Kelly Wearstler fascinates me so much.
Her work is obviously beautiful, but beautiful feels like an almost useless word for describing what makes it special. Plenty of interior designers make beautiful rooms.
Kelly’s rooms feel Kelly.
There’s an incredible amount happening in them - shape, material, scale, colour, pattern, art, objects - and yet somehow none of it feels indecisive.
Quite the opposite. It feels extraordinarily resolved.
That’s probably the quality I admire most: Self-resolution.
Confidence doesn’t quite describe it.
Confidence can be loud. Confidence can be performed. Confidence can also be completely unjustified.
Self-resolution feels different.
It’s the sense that someone knows what belongs in their world and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t.
There are no apologetic edges. No softening for anyone else’s sake.
You get the same feeling from Gwyneth Paltrow. She has spent years building a world that plenty of people have found ridiculous, elitist, brilliant, fascinating, aspirational or some combination of all five. But you always know when something belongs in the Goop universe.
Wes Anderson has it to an almost absurd degree. His creative language has become so distinct that his name is effectively an adjective. People don’t merely reference Wes Anderson films. They describe hotels, photographs, outfits, advertisements and entire TikTok trends as Wes Anderson-esque.
Imagine becoming so distinctive that culture starts using your name to describe things you had absolutely nothing to do with.
Surely that is one of the great markers of iconicity.
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The more I looked, the more I started noticing patterns.
The first is that icons own something.
Like, culturally.
Nike owns a particular version of athletic ambition.
Robert owns a particular kind of joyful Australian earnestness, the same way that Martha owns power in domesticity.
Erewhon has somehow managed to own a very specific version of aspirational wellness despite, when you really think about it, being a grocery store.
Kelly owns a visual universe.
Pamela increasingly owns something more abstract: a particular kind of midlife freedom and self-possession.
None of them are the only people doing those things.
That’s important.
There are thousands of sports brands. Thousands of homemakers. Thousands of interior designers. And Los Angeles is hardly short of places selling expensive green juice.
But at some point, these people or companies became disproportionately associated with a particular idea.
They planted a flag.
And stayed there long enough for the rest of us to notice.
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The second thing is that icons are compressible.
This might be my favourite part of the whole theory.
You can take an enormous, complicated creative universe and reduce it to a remarkably small number of signals without losing its DNA.
The recent H&M collaborations are a perfect example.
What makes a collaboration with someone like Kelly Wearstler so satisfying isn’t simply that she has designed some nice things at a more accessible price point. It’s that the pieces somehow contain her entire world.
A red trench coat and you think: Kelly.
A handful of objects and you understand the room they came from.
WARDROBE.NYC has achieved something similar through its H&M collaboration. Take a highly specific fashion language - shape, proportion, restraint, attitude - translate it into another company and price point, and somehow the DNA survives.
That feels significant.
Perhaps one of the tests of a truly iconic idea is whether it can survive translation.
Change the medium, change the category, change the scale or even change the price.
Does it still feel like you?
If the answer is yes, your DNA might be stronger than your aesthetic.
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This also made me reconsider what we mean when we talk about consistency.
Branding has historically been obsessed with consistency.
Same colours, fonts, photographic treatment. Same visual codes repeated over and over again until recognition is achieved through sheer force.
But some of the most iconic people and brands aren’t particularly consistent in that sense.
Pamela Anderson today looks almost nothing like the Pamela Anderson embedded in our collective memory from the 1990s.
And yet somehow her current incarnation has made her more compelling, not less.
The transformation itself belongs to her story.
Lore shape-shift visually on the daily and still feels like Lore.
Jimmy Butler is another version of this. His world somehow stretches from an incredibly grand, design-led home to a bold coffee brand, a playful NBA persona and a beautifully polished eyewear campaign. On paper, those things shouldn’t necessarily belong together. Through Jimmy, they do.
Maybe iconicity isn’t consistency.
Maybe it’s coherence without sameness.
You can change dramatically if the thing underneath the change remains intact.
The DNA is unbreakable.
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Then there’s something else.
Icons are incredibly difficult to substitute.
This is where the difference between excellence and iconicity becomes particularly obvious to me.
There are hotels more luxurious than Chateau Marmont.
There are skincare products clinically more validated than Rhode.
There are designers with extraordinary taste who aren’t Kelly Wearstler.
There are fragrance brands larger than Lore.
But replacing one of these things with its technically superior competitor doesn’t necessarily preserve the meaning. Because perhaps iconicity isn’t about being the best.
Perhaps it’s about being the least interchangeable.
I keep coming back to that.
In business we’re taught to find competitive advantages. Better product. Better price. Better distribution. Better customer experience.
All important.
But iconic things seem to compete on a stranger dimension.
They have become so specifically themselves that comparison starts becoming slightly irrelevant.
What is the competitor to Chateau Marmont?
Technically, hundreds of hotels.
Culturally?
That’s a much harder question.
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Which leads me to lore (note the lowercase, I’m not referring to the brand this time).
Every icon seems to accumulate stories.
Not brand storytelling in the slightly painful marketing sense.
Actual mythology.
Chateau Marmont has decades of Hollywood stories embedded in its walls.
Martha Stewart has built a cultural mythology so strange and contradictory that no brand strategist could have invented it: domestic perfection, business empire, prison, Snoop Dogg, reinvention, sex symbol.
Jimmy Butler isn’t simply an elite basketball player. There’s BIGFACE coffee, the hair, the competitiveness, the personality, the stories that follow him around the league.
Pamela’s current chapter means something because we remember the previous ones. Her bare face contains more cultural information because we remember the makeup. The white shirt means something because we remember the red swimsuit. Her reinvention has context.
And maybe that’s why mythology is impossible to manufacture quickly.
You need events. Contradictions. Time?
Other people telling stories about you. Moments that become part of collective memory.
You can’t renovate your way into mythology.
You can create a beautiful hotel tomorrow.
But you cannot create the Chateau Marmont tomorrow.
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Icons also generate imitation.
This feels like one of the clearest signals that something has crossed over from successful into culturally significant.
Other people start borrowing the codes.
Suddenly campaigns look Rhode-ish.
Health stores become more Erewhon-y.
Filmmakers borrow Wes Anderson’s visual language.
Brands adopt the aesthetic cues of Miu Miu.
Designers start referencing Kelly.
Eventually the influence becomes so widespread that we almost forget where it came from.
Which is an interesting paradox.
Imitation should theoretically dilute the original, but instead, it often strengthens it.
Because every imitation quietly points backwards.
The copies become evidence of the original’s influence.
Maybe an icon is something culture doesn’t simply consume.
Culture starts metabolising it.
Its ideas escape the original container and begin showing up elsewhere.
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At this point in my investigation, I started wondering whether originality was the answer.
Maybe icons are simply unusually original.
Except that doesn’t quite work.
There are wildly original artists nobody knows.
Perhaps it’s taste.
But there are people with exquisite taste who never become culturally significant.
Confidence?
The world has no shortage of confident mediocrity.
Authenticity?
Closer. But there are billions of people authentically being themselves every day without becoming icons.
Obsession feels important.
I can’t imagine someone developing a creative language as recognisable as Kelly Wearstler’s without going extraordinarily deep into their particular thing. Or Gwyneth making work that controversial without an almost ridiculous level of participation.
Icons seem to have gone further into themselves than most people are willing to go.
They hone. Refine. Notice. Edit. Repeat. Protect.
Which perhaps explains another quality I see in almost all of them:
restraint.
Not aesthetic restraint.
Kelly Wearstler has conclusively disproved that theory.
Editorial restraint: Knowing what gets admitted into your world. And more importantly, knowing what doesn’t.
Having enough conviction to leave something out even when the market, algorithm or person holding the cheque is asking you to put it in.
That takes taste.
But it also takes nerve.
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Interestingly, I don’t think icons necessarily need to be polarising.
I initially wondered whether they did.
Distinctive things often create strong reactions, after all.
But then there’s Robert Irwin.
It’s difficult to argue that his appeal comes from division. His cultural power seems to come from almost the opposite: an extraordinary earnestness that feels increasingly unusual in a culture soaked in irony.
Rhode isn’t particularly confrontational either.
So perhaps polarisation isn’t the requirement.
Edge is.
There needs to be something that couldn’t have emerged from consensus.
Something new. A different behaviour. A new lane.
A redefinition of something we thought we understood.
Playing it safe might make you broadly appealing. But I’m not convinced it can make you iconic.
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Which brings me to a slightly uncomfortable observation.
Perhaps the greatest threat to iconicity is not failure.
It’s dilution.
We all receive enormous amounts of information about how we should behave.
What’s trending.
What performs.
What customers want.
What competitors are doing.
What the algorithm rewards.
What everyone else in our industry seems to have agreed good looks like.
And if you’re not careful, becoming more commercially sophisticated can gradually make you less distinct.
The edges soften. The weird thing becomes slightly less weird. The language becomes more familiar. The product becomes easier to categorise.
You start looking around instead of looking inward.
Until eventually you become extremely competent and completely interchangeable.
Icons seem to resist that process.
Not necessarily because they ignore culture… Quite the opposite. I suspect most of them are exceptionally culturally fluent.
But somehow they absorb culture without being flattened by it.
They remain themselves.
Maybe that’s what I mean by self-resolution.
The ability to participate in culture without asking culture who you should be.
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So after spending far too much time thinking about this, I thought I might have cracked it.
There seem to be six behaviours that keep appearing.
Icons own something.
They’re compressible.
They’re difficult to confuse with anyone else.
They generate imitation.
They accumulate lore.
And eventually, they represent something beyond themselves.
Underneath all of that seems to sit obsession, self-resolution and restraint.
You could almost turn it into an equation.
Difference.
Conviction.
Coherence.
Cultural fluency.
Repetition.
Time.
Surely if we can identify the ingredients, we can manufacture the outcome?
And this is where the whole theory falls apart.
Because we can’t.
H&M is a useful example. It is enormously successful, globally recognised and commercially powerful.
And yet I don’t personally feel much cultural gravity towards H&M itself.
What it does extraordinarily well is borrow cultural gravity.
Kelly Wearstler enters H&M and suddenly I’m interested.
WARDROBE.NYC enters H&M and suddenly a mass retailer becomes an access point into a highly specific world.
The collaboration works precisely because one party possesses something the other can’t manufacture through scale alone.
Meaning.
Which makes me think iconicity requires one final ingredient that doesn’t belong to the person or company at all.
Culture has to give it back to you.
You can build the world, develop the codes and hone your taste. You can protect your difference, become obsessive and rinse and repeat until your point of view is unmistakable.
You can create something so resolved that it survives translation. You can do every single thing right.
And still, the culture has to care.
That’s the part you can’t put into a strategy deck.
The audience has to attach meaning. People have to imitate you. Stories have to accumulate.
Your work has to intersect with something the culture is feeling at precisely the right moment.
And eventually, if you’re extraordinarily good, unusually resolved and perhaps just a little fortunate, the thing you created stops belonging entirely to you.
It becomes shorthand for something. An era, an attitude or a way of seeing.
Maybe that’s what an icon actually is.
Not someone who has successfully convinced the world to look at them. But rather someone who has created something so unmistakably their own that, eventually, the world starts seeing other things through them.
And perhaps that’s why iconicity remains so fascinating.
We can reverse engineer almost all of it.
We can identify the ingredients.
We can create the conditions.
We can get tantalisingly close to a formula.
But the final 10% refuses to be manufactured.
You can build the world.
But culture decides whether it wants to move in.
