Ralph Fiennes wears a Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Ultra Thin

The King's Man (2021) is Matthew Vaughn's prequel, and it carries the Kingsman story back to the 1900s and the First World War. The watches from the later films could not come with it. Bremont built the pieces for The Secret Service in 2014 and TAG Heuer the smartwatches for The Golden Circle in 2017, and both would have been impossibly modern for a story set around 1914. So Jaeger-LeCoultre made something period-appropriate instead, a limited edition it calls the Master Ultra Thin Kingsman Knife, created for the film as the watch of Orlando Oxford, the founding Duke played by Ralph Fiennes.

Jaeger-LeCoultre drew on its own ultra-thin past. The Knife takes its name and its line from a 1907 Couteau pocket watch, couteau being French for knife, whose bezel slopes from the crystal down to the edge of the case like a blade. The film version is a 40mm pink gold dress watch just 4.25mm thick, with an unadorned white dial, slim blue hands, and the hand-wound calibre 849, a movement only 1.85mm deep. The winding crown sits at twelve under a small triangular bow, the old pocket-watch position, a nod to the years around the war when men first began strapping pocket watches to their wrists.

It was a numbered edition of 100, the Kingsman logo engraved on the caseback, priced at 29,800 dollars, and it went on sale through Mr Porter on July 20, 2020, well ahead of the delayed film, an online exclusive that ran until September 6. Mr Porter is the boutique that built a costume-to-collection line around the first Kingsman film, and Jaeger-LeCoultre sells the Knife under it, the dress watch for Orlando Oxford in the story that founds the Kingsman agency, run from a Savile Row tailor's shop.