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Every move Taylor Swift makes tends to cause serious ripples, like a monster on a hill slowly lurching toward your favorite city. All 149 shows of her Eras Tour inspired massive spending—not just on tickets and merch, but on travel, hotels, and local restaurants as well. She only announced her engagement to Kansas City Chiefs tight end and GQ cover star Travis Kelce on Tuesday, and yet her ring is already being heralded as a marker for a “return to vintage elegance” by the New York Times. And while the engagement ring might be hogging most of the spotlight, the watch Swift wore during the proposal has also seen an immediate bump in both interest and aura.
The engagement photos revealed that Swift’s watch of choice is a yellow-gold, diamond-set Cartier Santos Demoiselle. The Demoiselle variant of the Santos was discontinued in 2022, but its popularity is suddenly surging thanks to the superstar musician. “Well, everyone stock up on yellow-gold Cartier Demoiselle,” Kelly Yoch, the sales manager at Altier Jewelers, wrote on Instagram. “Taylor runs the show now.”
Courtesy of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce
What is the Cartier Santos Demoiselle?
The Cartier Santos is one of the original wristwatches. The design was first developed in 1904 for Louis Cartier’s buddy, the Brazilian pilot Alberto Santos-Dumont. Santos-Dumont wanted a timepiece he could easily glance at while flying, without needing to pull out a pocketwatch. The Santos Demoiselle, a version designed for women, was introduced in 2008 and took its name from the pilot’s most famous light aircraft.
“It’s a diminutive and slightly more feminine variant of the Santos, characterized by smoother polished lines,” says James Lamdin, the founder of vintage watch shop Analog:Shift, which just so happened to have a gemless version of the watch available for purchase. “They are an excellent example of Cartier’s roots in jewelry showing through, as they massage their core collection into special extensions. Cartier has a mastery of this that other brands would kill to achieve. Tank Louis Cartier not your jam? Stretch it, squeeze it, curve it, melt it—voila! Something entirely different while exactly the same.”
