If there’s one overriding takeaway from Harry & Meghan, it is that everything to do with the image of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, is painstakingly considered. Nothing is left to chance as the couple tries to take control of their narrative after feeling like they have been “fed to the wolves” and made a “scapegoat for the palace.” From the clothes they wear in the new docuseries interviews—a catalog of normalcy—to the jewelry Meghan models as a symbolic nod to a certain member of the royal family, the Sussexes have PR’ed their personal brand to the nth degree for this latest attempt at putting the record straight.
While the montage clips recapping the couple’s “fairy-tale” story are designed to show an ordinary girl from LA getting swept up in the world of a prince—all denim shorts, plaid shirts, and talisman charms—the Meghan who sits before Team Netflix is a businesswoman. Her gold Cartier jewelry speaks volumes about her values—investment and sentiment over impulse decisions—and where she’s at in her life now, while she tries to shape a legacy for her own children and rewrite the tale of the outsider getting shunned by the Firm.
Her gold Tank Française timepiece, for example, once belonged to Diana, the former Princess of Wales, who is name-checked numerous times in Harry & Meghan, as her son shares his wish to protect the duchess from suffering the same fate as his mother at the hands of the press. The Tank Française, which Meghan first wore at a Fortune magazine summit back in 2020, suggests the connection the former Suits star feels toward the mother-in-law she never met and semaphores strength.
Inspired by photographs of Renault FT-17 tanks deployed on the Western Front, Louis Cartier drew on the power of the engines, as well as the growing Cubism movement, for the 1917 rigid rectangular design. When the Française joined the Tank family in 1996, customers delighted in the integrated metal bracelet, which lent the piece a dressier feel. Diana owned both an original leather-strap version and the gold one, which wound up on the wrist of Meghan, but was first held in the custody of William.
Following Diana’s death in 1997, Vanity Fair reports that the princess’s butler Paul Burrell took her sons for a final turn through her Kensington Palace apartment, after which Harry went home with her diamond-and-sapphire engagement ring and his older brother chose the gold Cartier Tank Française. But when William began planning his proposal to Kate Middleton in 2010, he asked Harry if he would swap treasures. You only need to look at any picture of the newly crowned Princess of Wales to see how this tale ended. When Meghan came on the scene some six years later, Harry gifted the Française to the woman who already owned a two-tone version engraved with “To M.M. From M.M.” The storied wristwatch looks all the more poignant in Harry & Meghan, given how it was passed down from mother to son to brother, who has now become estranged from his family.
If the Tank has a certain toughness woven into those links, the duchess’s Cartier Love bracelet is all heart. Designed by Aldo Cipullo in 1969, the oval band, which sits close to the wrist and is studded with tiny screws, represents being locked in love, but because of its difficulty to remove (a teeny-tiny screwdriver is required), it revolutionized the way people wore jewelry every day. A signifier of wealth and status, the Love has always been nestled in the arm parties of celebrities, including Meghan, who enjoy clasping themselves into an elite club whose members once included Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
If the Cartier pieces bridge the gap between Meghan’s former life and her reality as a royal, the final poignant trinket she wears in Harry & Meghan—a Jennifer Meyer tennis bracelet—perhaps shows her efforts to stay grounded going forward. While the duchess has previously borrowed Diana’s beloved Cartier diamond tennis bracelet (in Fiji in 2018, at a Commonwealth Day service in 2019, and, most recently, a Salute to Freedom Gala in 2021), her own version, designed by a friend, puts a contemporary twist on a classic. Once known as an eternity bracelet, but renamed when Chris Evert lost her keepsake during a US Open match and insisted on stopping play until it was found, the string of stones catches the light or “sparkles like Californian sun” in Meyer’s case. No wonder Meghan is a fan.
For a woman who said “Above all, love wins” in her wedding speech, each token exemplifies the emotion that drives every decision in the Sussex household. “Nothing can break us,” Meghan Markle said when she joined the family in 2018. “For this love, she was a fighter.”
This article first appeared in British
