Maya Erskine wears a Cartier Tank

In one stretch of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, John and Jane stroll a crowded outdoor market in plain summer clothes, two people running the most ordinary errand a couple can run. The series, created by Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane for Prime Video in 2024, gives two strangers a single assignment: become a married couple named John and Jane Smith, sharing a house and a cover while a faceless agency feeds them jobs. Maya Erskine plays Jane, the more guarded and precise of the pair. The watch on her wrist is a Cartier Tank.

Louis Cartier drew the Tank in 1917 from the overhead lines of the Renault light tanks then crossing the Western Front: the strong bars down each side stand in for the treads, the case between them for the cockpit. It went on sale in 1919 and has changed little since. Jackie Kennedy owned one. So did Andy Warhol, who liked to say he never even wound his, that he wore the Tank because it was the watch to wear.

Which is exactly why it suits Jane. Madeline Weeks, the show's costume designer and a former fashion director at GQ, dressed Glover's John as the kind of man who notices watches, a Rolex and an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak among them. Jane gets the opposite kind of watch, a slim dress piece that signals taste rather than hardware. A spy who has to pass as an ordinary wife wears the watch chosen for how it reads, not for what it does.