Kirsten Dunst wears a Hermès Cape Cod

On a grass court at Wimbledon, in a white Puma tennis dress trimmed in red, Lizzie Bradbury stares down her next point. The crowd is packed in behind her, and on her left wrist, wrapped twice around in white leather, is an Hermes Cape Cod. Richard Loncraine directed Wimbledon (2004), a romantic comedy in which a fading British player, Paul Bettany's Peter Colt, falls for Kirsten Dunst's Bradbury, a rising American star, over the fortnight of the tournament.

The Cape Cod is one of the more quietly clever watch designs of the last forty years. Henri d'Origny drew it in 1991, after Hermes chairman Jean-Louis Dumas asked him for, of all things, a square watch for women. D'Origny answered with a square set inside a rectangle, and he took the shape of the case lugs from the Chaine d'Ancre, the anchor-chain motif Robert Dumas had created for Hermes back in 1938. The long white strap that loops the wrist twice is the watch's signature, a way of letting a small dress watch read as a leather bracelet. It is the logic of a fashion house that makes watches rather than a watchmaker that dabbles in fashion.

Bradbury, though, is wearing it to play a Grand Slam match. A leather-strapped fashion watch, wound twice around the racket hand, is about the least practical thing a real tennis player could strap on for center court, where the genuine article wears nothing at all or a sweatproof digital. The watch is lovely and completely wrong for the moment, which is how you can tell it is a costume choice rather than kit. The brand never resolves on screen, but the rectangular case and that double-wrap white strap are pure Cape Cod.