Jamie Foxx wears an IWC Portugieser

The sit-down is all stillness: Ricardo Tubbs and Sonny Crockett sit across a bare table from the men on the other side of an undercover drug buy, hands folded, a glass of whiskey and a saucer of limes between them. On Tubbs's left wrist, catching the low blue light of Michael Mann's Miami Vice (2006), is an IWC Portugieser Chronograph, the watch Jamie Foxx's character wears through the film's daytime work.

The Portuguese line is IWC's large-watch origin story. In 1939 two Portuguese retailers asked the Schaffhausen company for a wristwatch that held the accuracy of a marine deck chronometer, and the only way to manage it then was to fit a big pocket-watch movement into a wristwatch. The result ran outsized for its era and never slimmed down. Tubbs wears the Portuguese Chrono-Automatic, a roughly 41mm steel piece with the line's railway-track minute ring and applied Arabic numerals, a black dial and two silvered registers, small seconds at six and a sixty-minute counter at twelve. Europa Star, writing up the film's watch placement, described that same black face and silver sub-dial.

Tubbs alone carries two IWCs across the picture, the Portugieser by day and an IWC Aquatimer chronograph for the night runs. The tie-in reached past the screen. To mark the film, IWC built a Miami Vice edition of the Portuguese Chronograph, reference 371404, fifty pieces, each with the Miami Vice logo and its serial engraved into the caseback. What most viewers saw on Foxx's wrist was the standard production chronograph; for fifty buyers, the same watch became something they could actually order.