Donald Glover wears a Rolex GMT-Master II

Across the first season of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the wrist of Donald Glover's John Smith carries a different Rolex from one episode to the next. Glover plays John as a recruit who takes a job with a shadowy agency and gets a fake marriage to Maya Erskine's Jane as his cover, the pair run by a handler who only ever shows up as a chat window. The show's costume designer, Madeline Weeks, gave him a collector's habit to match the paydays. "Every time he does a mission, we were thinking that John might go shopping," she told GQ. Over eight episodes John works through a Daytona, a Submariner, and two GMT-Master IIs, one in brown-and-black Root Beer, one in red-and-blue Pepsi.

Those colors are not decoration. Rolex built the first GMT-Master in 1955 for Pan American pilots opening the long transatlantic routes, adding a fourth hand and a 24-hour bezel so a pilot could read a second time zone at a glance, red for the daylight half and blue for the night. The modern GMT-Master II keeps that layout in a 40mm steel case. On a working spy it is a real tool and a conspicuous one, the kind of watch an enthusiast spots from across a bar.

That contradiction is the costume department's actual point. Weeks dressed a man whose job is to go unnoticed in watches that almost no one can walk into a store and buy. "Each Rolex that he wears, you can't even get those watches," she said, and a steel GMT-Master II is exactly that, the kind you put your name down for rather than pick off a tray. John Smith can disappear into any city in the world, but not past anyone who recognizes what is on his wrist.