In my mind’s eye, the lasting image of Lana Del Rey comes from her 2012 “National Anthem” music video: her and A$AP Rocky on the Cape, cosplaying as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and John F. Kennedy. Throughout her career, Del Rey has crafted an uncanny collage of Americana, using her music to scrutinize, caricaturize, and ultimately embrace what it means to be American. Her songs reference roadside burger shacks and Coney Island motels, and last summer she even got behind the counter of a Waffle House in Alabama to serve a customer. There’s a reason Pitchfork once anointed her the “next best American songwriter”: Few current musicians understand and play with American iconography like Del Rey.
All of that brings us to Del Rey’s new watch: a Jacob & Co. rose-gold Fleurs de Jardin. The piece is simultaneously girlish and garish, using 178 pink sapphires to depict a garden teeming with butterflies—44 of those sapphires compose the pink butterfly clasp on the strap. It looks like something straight out of the Pretty Pretty Princess board game, only splashed with diamonds to meet Jacob & Co.’s extravagant standards—precisely the kind of high-low mash-up that Del Rey often interrogates in her music. (One of her albums is called Chemtrails Over the Country Club.) Only 12 of these watches were produced. “Flowers have long served as a motif for musician Lana Del Rey’s work, communicating a sense of graceful beauty and the importance of remaining authentic to yourself regardless of others,” the brand said in a statement. “A shared value between the recording artist and Jacob & Co.”
Del Rey and Jacob & Co.—an iconically American brand—feel like a match made in heaven. In the 1990s and 2000s, the company’s founder, Jacob Arabo, was the only jeweler who mattered to the likes of Kanye West, Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Pharrell, the Notorious B.I.G., and Naomi Campbell. Arabo, known as the “King of Bling,” was famous not just for his ultra-complicated blinged-out watches, but also for turning pop culture figures into diamond-encrusted pendants. (This Mario made for Pharrell swallowed a special kind of mushroom.)
Arabo’s is also a uniquely American story. He immigrated at 14 from then-Soviet Uzbekistan, built an empire of ice, spent two years in prison for lying during a federal investigation, and has since continued his run of dominance into the present, creating unforgettable pieces for megastars like Rihanna. While Arabo is frequently name-checked in rap songs, he’s the type of figure that could be the subject of an entire LDR song: a character who has overcome several bumps in the road by paving them over in diamonds.
Or maybe Del Rey just really likes butterflies.
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