Brad Pitt wears a Rolex Day-Date

Watch Brad Pitt in Ocean's Twelve and you start to notice that he is always eating. A shrimp cocktail in one scene, a sandwich in the next, something in his hand almost every time he is on screen. It is a bit that runs through the whole trilogy. Pitt plays Rusty Ryan, Danny Ocean's right hand and the man who works out the mechanics of a job while Ocean handles the charm. He spends the movie in a light gray silk suit, and on his wrist, catching the light in a dim hallway, is a Rolex Day-Date on a President bracelet.

The Day-Date arrived in 1956 as Rolex's flagship, the first wristwatch to spell the day of the week out in full across the top of the dial. It was made only in precious metal, and it introduced the three-piece link bracelet that Rolex named the President. The watch became associated with heads of state, and the name stuck. Rusty's is a platinum example with an ice-blue dial, the pale glacier color that Rolex puts on platinum cases and nowhere else. You can read the metal off the dial. If the blue is that soft, the case is platinum.

There is a quiet logic to hanging a watch like that on a thief. Rusty moves through hotels and back rooms where the marks are casino owners and fences, men who own platinum Rolexes of their own. The suit and the watch are the cost of admission. Dress like the people you plan to rob, and nobody looks twice.