There are plenty of questionable menswear habits from the 1970s that deserve to stay buried alongside shag carpeting and nicotine-yellow tailoring. Wearing your watch over your shirt cuff, however, might deserve another look. At the premiere of Disclosure Day, Josh O’Connor arrived wearing a yellow-gold Cartier Tank Américaine not beneath his sleeve like a normal person, but fully over it—a styling move most famously associated with the late Fiat magnate Giovanni “Gianni” Agnelli. Agnelli may have wore his watches this way partly out of impatience, expert-level sprezzatura, or because he understood something many modern celebrities don’t: Great style occasionally requires doing something faintly ridiculous with complete confidence.
Few people attempt the move today, probably because it’s incredibly easy to look absurd. The over-the-cuff watch occupies dangerous menswear territory somewhere between rakish and completely unhinged. Done poorly, it looks like you got dressed in the dark while sprinting to a board meeting. Done well—as O’Connor somehow manages here—it projects exactly the sort of louche, anti-perfectionist confidence.
Courtesy of Cartier; Getty Images
What’s increasingly clear is that O’Connor’s watch choices rarely feel accidental. Yes, he recently wore a humble G-Shock in Wake Up Dead Man, but that had the unmistakable whiff of prop-department realism rather than personal collecting taste. Off-screen, his instincts skew considerably more refined. Over the past year, the actor has repeatedly gravitated toward ultra-thin Bulgari Octo Finissimo models—arguably the defining minimalist luxury sports watch of the past decade—and now toward one of Cartier’s most elegant shaped dress watches. The through-line isn’t hype or flex culture so much as sharp design and restraint.
That sensibility makes the Tank Américaine especially appropriate. Introduced in 1989 as a curved, elongated reinterpretation of the classic Tank Cintrée, the Américaine has always occupied an intriguing middle ground within Cartier’s lineup. It’s dressier and more dramatic than the standard Tank Louis Cartier, but less severe than the even longer Cintrée. O’Connor’s yellow-gold version—with its stretched Art Deco proportions, silvered dial, and deep-blue alligator strap—leans fully into old-world elegance. More importantly, it reflects Cartier’s increasingly dominant position within modern watch collecting.
A decade ago, celebrity watch culture largely revolved around steel sports watches: Daytonas, Royal Oaks, Nautiluses, and increasingly aggressive flex pieces dripping in gemstones. But collector taste has shifted sharply toward shaped dress watches with genuine design pedigree, and no brand has benefited more from that change than Cartier. The maison now sits just behind Rolex as the second-largest watchmaker in the world by revenue, fueled not merely by mainstream icons like the Santos and Tank, but by renewed enthusiasm for its stranger, more design-forward pieces. Among collectors, watches like the Crash, Baignoire, Tortue, and Cintrée have become genuine objects of obsession. The Américaine, once slightly overshadowed within the Tank family, has increasingly ridden that same wave.
