Arnas Fedaravicius wears a Vostok Amphibian

In The White Lotus, Valentin holds a leather menu folder to the chest of his brown staff uniform, and the watch on the wrist that pins it there is, in a resort full of luxury watches, the cheapest by a wide margin. Arnas Fedaravicius plays him, the Russian wellness mentor in the show's third season, set at a White Lotus on the coast of Thailand, hired in part for a physique the trio of visiting friends notices before anything else about him.

The watch is a Vostok Amphibian, the Soviet dive watch Vostok has built in Chistopol since 1967 and still sells, little changed, for around a hundred dollars. It is a small steel automatic, sealed to two hundred meters. The bezel is the part the Amphibian is known for, a ring that turns both ways on friction alone, with no click to hold it in place. On Valentin the choice reads as deliberate, a Russian watch on a Russian.

So Valentin wears two hundred meters of water resistance to walk a wellness spa. The Amphibian was built for submariners and sold cheap, and here it keeps time beside a pool for guests who arrived in Rolexes. Saxon Ratliff's Hublot Big Bang runs into five figures. The watch on the wrist of the man standing over his table cost about a hundred dollars.