Myha'la wears a TAG Heuer Link

Harper Stern leans over her desk into a bank of Bloomberg monitors, a phone in one hand and a bearded man's face open in a video window in front of her. Myha'la plays Harper across HBO's Industry, the American who lied about her degree to get onto a London trading floor and then spends the series trying to turn a junior salary into real money. The show tracks that climb partly through watches. By the account of costume designer Laura Smith, Harper goes from a single watch to three at once, a Cartier Tank Must, a TAG Heuer Link Date, and an Oris Aquis, all of them bought at the end of the third season as she starts assembling her own wealth.

The TAG Heuer Link began in 1987 as the S/el, short for Sport and Elegance, and took the Link name in 1999 for the bracelet itself, a chain of polished steel pieces shaped like flattened S's. The Date model adds only a date window to a clean dial. New, it runs to a few thousand dollars of Swiss steel, an aspirational watch rather than a grail, which is the reason it suits Harper better than anything rarer would.

Smith sets Harper's bought watches against inherited ones. Henry, the aristocrat played by Kit Harington, wears a 1974 Rolex Datejust meant as an eighteenth-birthday present; Yasmin keeps her grandmother's rose-gold Cartier Tank. Those are heirlooms. Harper's TAG Heuer is something she chose and paid for herself, and the moment of buying it never reaches the screen. Smith built it into the character anyway: the audience never watches Harper buy the watches, but the costume department decided that she did.