Bradley Cooper wears an unidentified watch

Mark Bridges built Leonard Bernstein out of old photographs. The costume designer on Maestro, Bradley Cooper's 2023 film about the conductor, had decades of images to work from, the suits and the turtleneck years and the boots, and he reasoned his way back to what a young Bernstein would have owned, down to the rule that a man of twenty-five owns one good suit. Chanel helped recreate one of Felicia Montealegre's tweed suits. And then, asked about the watch, Bridges would not name it. He called it 'the kind of wristwatch I imagine someone like him would get as a graduation gift.' He was describing the man, not naming the watch.

Through most of the film's 1970s scenes Bernstein wears a hefty yellow-gold piece with a cushion-shaped case, a champagne dial, gold markers at every hour but three, and a white date wheel in the window at three, all of it riding on a gold Speidel Twist-O-Flex expansion bracelet with ridged links. BAMF Style fixes one appearance to the summer of 1977, in New York, after Felicia's oncology appointment, with Bernstein in a tan, safari-cut suit. Cooper, who directed the film and plays Bernstein, wears a watch on a metal expansion band in the black-and-white couch scenes beside Carey Mulligan's Felicia as well, the bracelet catching the light while the dial stays hidden under his cuff.

No one has taken it past the description. Nick Guzan, who wrote the most careful account of the costume at BAMF Style, only 'suspect[s] an automatic Bulova from the late 1960s,' and passes along the three guesses circulating on Reddit: a Bulova Accutron, a Rado Conway 30, a vintage Tudor. Esquire prints it flatly as a Bulova Accutron. The Accutron is not an automatic. It is an electronic watch run by a tuning fork, so the name people reach for first works against the description the careful observer wrote down. Nothing on screen carries a legible badge, no production note names a brand, and the man who dressed him would only call it a graduation gift.

So the watch stays unidentified. A film that reconstructed forty years of a life from photographs put a dress watch on Bernstein and wore it through the seventies without ever saying what it was.