Myha'la wears a Cartier Tank

By the fourth season of Industry, Harper Stern wears a Cartier Tank, the Must de Cartier, the steel model that is the most affordable way into the line. Myha'la plays Harper, the American outsider who fought her way into London finance and now runs a short-only fund with Eric Tao. Last season she owned one watch. This season she owns three, and she bought all of them herself.

The Tank is not new. Louis Cartier drew it in 1917 after seeing the Renault tanks on the Western Front, handed the prototype to General John Pershing, and put it into full production in 1919, the strap running straight into the vertical bars, the brancards, that give the case its shape. A hundred years on, the design still reads as inherited money, which is exactly why the show puts it on a woman who inherited nothing.

The series' costume designer, Laura Smith, says Harper buys her watches at the end of the third season, off screen, as the foundation of a fortune she is building from scratch. Yasmin keeps her grandmother's rose-gold Tank Louis Cartier because she cannot bear to sell it. One Tank bought, one inherited. Smith dressed forty or fifty watches across the cast this season and works them like a mixing deck, lifting one detail until it lands without a word of dialogue.

The most telling thing about Harper's Tank is a scene Industry never shot: the afternoon she walked in and bought, with her own money, the kind of watch other people are simply handed.