Harry Lawtey wears a Rolex Day-Date

On the sofa in his flat, a girlfriend's arms draped over his shoulders, Robert Spearing sits in an unbuttoned pink dress shirt with a gold watch loose on his wrist. Harry Lawtey plays Spearing in Industry, the HBO and BBC series about young graduates clawing for a desk at the London investment bank Pierpoint & Co, and Robert is the state-school charmer among them, the one selling himself on personality because the pedigree the others have was never his.

The watch is a Rolex Day-Date, the President, a yellow-gold watch with a fluted bezel and the day spelled out in full across the top of the dial. It is the most aspirational watch in the show's vocabulary, the one a City managing director wears to prove he arrived, and putting it on a junior like Spearing reads as ambition worn a size too big, the costume of the man he means to become.

Industry treats watches as a class language, and Robert's choice speaks louder than his seat. The series ran from 2020 as a study of who gets to keep the money, and Spearing spends it learning that the watch is far easier to buy than the standing it is supposed to announce.