Max Minghella wears a TAG Heuer Monaco

Later in Industry's fourth season, in a low-lit lounge, Whitney Halberstram meets Harper Stern, the short seller who will eventually take his company apart, and he wears a TAG Heuer Monaco to do it. Max Minghella plays Whitney as a man with no fixed center: the founder of a fraudulent fintech startup called Tender, and, by the show's own account, an homage to Patricia Highsmith's conman Tom Ripley. Costume designer Laura Smith told GQ she chose his watches to mirror whoever he wanted to draw close, so that he could hide in plain sight.

The Monaco is about as conventionally masculine as a watch gets, and it has been since 1969. Heuer launched it that year as an entirely new model built around one of the first automatic chronograph movements, the Calibre 11, in a shape nothing else had: a square steel case, a metallic blue dial, and the crown moved to the left to advertise that an automatic never needs daily winding. Steve McQueen strapped one over his racing suit in the 1971 film Le Mans, reference 1133B, and fixed it as shorthand for a certain unbothered cool. That film-worn watch sold at auction in 2020 for 2.2 million dollars, the most ever paid for a Heuer.

None of which belongs to Whitney. His sexuality is left undefined, like the rest of him, so the most masculine watch in the drawer reads as one more borrowed skin, worn to suit the person across the table. It is a costume he keeps swapping: a brash Hublot Big Bang in the early scenes with his cofounder, the Monaco for Harper, a quieter Longines when he tries to pass in front of the aristocrat Henry Muck. By the finale, with Tender exposed and the money gone, he has set the status pieces aside for a plain field watch, the first thing on his wrist he is not using to imitate someone else.