Fans of sports cars often wear a T-shirt or a ball cap emblazoned with the brand of their choice—the Chevrolet Corvette or Ford Mustang, for example.
But buyers of elite sports cars like those from Bugatti have far less humble options for professing their loyalty.
Among them is a belt buckle from designer Roland Iten, which sells for a lot more than you’d have to pay to put a new Corvette and Mustang in your garage.
Maybe it’s only fitting. The Bugatti Veyron is a marvel that produces more than 1,000 horsepower and costs upwards of $1.7 million.
So a T-shirt hardly seems like it would do.
Iten makes what you might call the Bugatti of belt buckles. He has transformed the utilitarian cinch into high-end mechanized art. And he, like Bugatti, works in precious materials, such as gold and titanium.
His Geneva-based boutique, which uses Swiss watch-making equipment to craft its exquisite belt buckles, features several designs on its website, of which the Bugatti model is one. All are mechanically adjustable to allow for a precise fit around the waistline, unlike buckles that use the notches on a belt.
Iten designed three different versions of his Calibre R22 Mark I Bugatti Edition belt buckles, with the total number limited to 44. He made only 11 each for the first series, which is in white gold, and the second series, which is in rose gold. The price is 75,000 Swiss francs, or nearly $84,000 at current exchange rates. The third series is yet to come.