A note on ten quiet years, and the work now ready to be seen. ICONYC began in New York in June 2016. For most of the years since, we have said very little in public. This is the first time the whole of it has been gathered in one place, and I owe you a word on why that took so long, and why the quiet was chosen rather than accidental.

Over the years I came to suspect that the disciplines we keep in separate rooms are not separate at all. A fragrance and a piece of music are one problem approached from two sides. A magazine, a bottle, a film, a line of code, each is a way of trying to make a feeling last. ICONYC exists to keep them under one roof and hold them to one standard, rather than let them drift into a dozen unrelated names. So we worked quietly. A maison is not announced, it is assembled. We gave two years to this site alone, not because a website should take two years, but because we did not want to show you the scaffolding before the house was ready. We hoped the first thing you saw would be real, in that every division here makes something you can hold, taste, read, hear, or use.

You will find a lifestyle house in Maison ICONYC, a drinks collection gathered around a distillery of our own, a music arm of labels and radio, a publishing division, and a ventures side where we make software and film and stand behind the work of people we believe in. Very little of it is a promise on paper.

Most is already made, and the rest is close. The three years of silence were not a strategy, and I would not hold them up as one. They were simply the time the work asked for, taken without shortcuts, so that we would not have to ask you to imagine what we meant to make. This is only the beginning of showing you, and it will come slowly, in stages, because there is a great deal here and because each thing deserves to be met on its own rather than lost in a flood. Take your time with it. We took ours.