Rob Lowe wears a Rolex Submariner

In The West Wing, a steel sports watch rides under the cuff of Sam Seaborn's dress shirt: black dial, dark rotating bezel, a steel bracelet on the wrist of a man who spends his days writing speeches and arguing policy. Rob Lowe plays Seaborn, the deputy White House communications director on Aaron Sorkin's NBC drama, a lawyer who gave up private practice for the Bartlet administration. The series premiered in 1999 and ran seven seasons.

The watch is a Rolex Submariner Date, the dive watch Rolex has built since the 1950s. The Date version carries a steel case near 40mm, a unidirectional bezel for timing a descent, water resistance to 300 meters, and a date window at three o'clock under a small Cyclops lens. GQ's watch column picked it out in 2020 and named the exact variant, Sam Seaborn's Submariner Date.

GQ called it a goofy detail. By the column's account, no president of those years wore a watch so expensive: Bill Clinton ran the country in a plastic Timex Ironman, and George W. Bush in a cheap Timex of his own. A steel Submariner Date lists for more than ten thousand dollars today and trades higher, so Seaborn outspends both presidents on his wrist. He sits at a desk. The rotating bezel times no descent and the 300 meters of water resistance meet nothing deeper than a coffee cup, so the watch does for him exactly what the plastic Timex did for the presidents: it tells him the time.