Myha'la wears an Oris Aquis

On the trading floor, Harper Stern moves like someone who has decided she belongs there. In the fourth season of Industry she and Eric Tao have walked out of Pierpoint to run a short-only fund, raising money and aiming it at Tender, where Henry and Yasmin are trying to keep both the company and their marriage afloat. Harper inherited none of it. Myha'la plays her as a climber who arrived on nerve and now has the cash to show for it.

One of the things she buys is an Oris Aquis. Oris is an independent Swiss company founded in 1904 that builds only mechanical watches, and the Aquis is its dive line, a steel watch good to 300 meters. It is the least famous name on Harper's wrist and close to the least expensive thing on it. That is the point of it.

By the account of Laura Smith, who designs the show's costumes, Harper owned one watch last season and owns three this one: a Tank Must de Cartier, a TAG Heuer Link Date, and the Oris. Smith decided Harper bought all three at the end of the previous season, a purchase the show never films but treats as fact. None of them is a five-figure trophy. Smith says her job is to keep a piece from sticking out, to run it like the volume on a mixing desk, high enough to register and no higher.

That is the line between Harper and the people she is shorting. Henry wears a 1974 Rolex Datejust handed down to him; Harper has no one to hand her anything, so she buys her own. Smith argues that watches now do the work mourning jewelry used to, carrying sentimental value on top of the monetary kind, which puts Harper in a strange position. With no family pieces coming to her, she is buying the heirlooms she means to leave, the Oris among them, decades ahead of needing them.