As you know, last month, Taylor Swift’s engagement photos set off a frenzy online. Now that the dust has settled on the ninth most-liked Instagram post of all time, one detail still begs for attention: the Cartier Demoiselle in yellow gold with a diamond-set bezel on her wrist. Introduced in 1996 and quietly discontinued in the 2000s, the Demoiselle never managed to achieve the status of a Cartier heavy-hitter. Unlike the Panthère—crowned the it girl watch of the 2020s—or the Tank Française, with its royal pedigree, the Demoiselle remained overlooked. With a single photo, though, Swift vaulted it from obscurity into obsession.
In doing so, she joined a rare lineage of cultural figures whose timepieces have become inseparable from their names. Paul Newman’s Daytona went from a slow seller to the most collectable Rolex of all time—cemented when his personal watch sold at auction for $17.8 million in 2017. Steve McQueen’s unusually square-shaped Tag Heuer Monaco was set to be discontinued before an appearance on his character’s wrist in the 1971 racing classic Le Mans. Jackie Kennedy’s Cartier Tank Normale reframed the 1918 design as the epitome of American elegance, and later fetched nearly $380,000 at auction. And Elizabeth Taylor wrapped Bulgari’s sinuous Serpenti around her wrist on the set of 1962’s Cleopatra, sealing its reputation as an icon of sensuality and Italian glamour.
Watches continue to ornament our changing world in its various permutations, but only a few break free of trend cycles to become permanent cultural touchstones. Now, the Cartier Demoiselle may simply be known as “the Taylor Swift.”
What Swift has done in 2025 is not so different from what Newman, McQueen, Jackie O, and Elizabeth Taylor did decades before: forever immortalizing a watch. The way Madonna made Jean Paul Gaultier’s cone bra a cultural artefact, or Bianca Jagger transformed a white YSL tuxedo into a feminist emblem. These celebrity associations are more than marketing coups. In watches, they reset the way entire models are perceived, sold, and collected. They turn accessory into mythology—and, in the age of the internet commentariat, that mythology spreads faster than ever.
Cartier has long been unrivalled when it comes to cultivating watch design icons. The Tank: a simple rectangular case that became the template for countless brands. The Santos: a watch born of aviation, whose industrial geometry has endured and shapeshifted for more than a century. The Panthère: a jewelry-meets-watch creation that became shorthand for ’80s glamour before roaring back as the ultimate it girl accessory of the 2020s.