Interestingly, I found this problem after deploying my django project. Because the django-compress works only in production mode.
your icon won't show as espected if you put the icon link into the compress template tag:
{% compress css %}
<link href="{% static 'images/favicon.ico' %}" rel="icon"> <!-- icon -->
<link href="{% static 'css/project.css' %}" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
{% block css %}{% endblock css%}
{% endcompress %}
simply put the icon link outside the compress template tag:
<link href="{% static 'images/favicon.ico' %}" rel="icon"> # icon
{% compress css %}
<link href="{% static 'css/project.css' %}" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
{% block css %}{% endblock css %}
{% endcompress %}
restart your project and you will see your icon.