Henry Golding wears an Omega Seamaster

On a couch in Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Nick Young drapes an arm around Rachel Chu, and at his wrist sits a small vintage watch on a black leather strap. Nick, played by Henry Golding, spends the film concealing from Rachel that his family runs a real estate empire in Singapore and ranks among the country's wealthiest dynasties. The watch is a vintage Omega Seamaster De Ville, and it was never a costume piece: it belongs to Golding. The day after the film opened, GQ took the new leading man to Manhattan's Diamond District for a story on his watch habit, and the coverage that followed established that the De Ville on Nick's wrist was the actor's personal watch, one the watch press reported he had bought in Singapore.

Golding turned out to be a genuine collector. The GQ shoot showed a four-piece lineup: a Cartier Pasha XL Moonphase, the vintage Seamaster De Ville, a Cartier Santos 100 and a Tudor Black Bay Black. He wore a gold Cartier Tank to the film's premiere, and Cartier later signed him as an ambassador. Omega enthusiasts put their own loupe on the screen watch and read it as a late-1950s or early-1960s piece, one forum member calling it a 14-karat example with the date. The film itself keeps the watch coy. In the couch scene the strap and buckle show clearly while the case turns away from the camera.

Jon M. Chu directed the adaptation of Kevin Kwan's novel, the first film from a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Chinese descent in a modern setting since The Joy Luck Club in 1993. It opened on August 15, 2018 and took 239 million dollars worldwide. The quiet-money look the De Ville fits into was built deliberately: costume designer Mary Vogt worked from vintage family photographs Kevin Kwan shared to show how Singapore's old-money society dressed, very classy and very elegant, against the louder wealth of families like the Gohs.