Robert Pattinson wears a Chanel J12 Chromatic

David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, from the Don DeLillo novel, follows Eric Packer, a 28-year-old billionaire asset manager who spends a day crossing Manhattan in a white stretch limousine to get a haircut while his bet against the Chinese yuan wipes out his fortune and the city riots outside the glass. Robert Pattinson plays him in a single outfit, worn for the entire film: a black Gucci suit, a white shirt and a slim black tie. The one thing on him that is not Gucci is the watch, a Chanel J12 Chromatic.

It is the 41-millimeter version, reference H2934, cased in what Chanel calls titanium ceramic: titanium powder worked into the ceramic and then polished with diamond dust, which gives it a grey metallic sheen and a hardness close to sapphire. It runs an automatic movement, is water resistant to 200 meters, and retailed around seven thousand dollars. Chanel is a fashion house rather than an old Swiss manufacture, and the titanium ceramic was the kind of material a serious watchmaker would have been glad to claim.

The placement went well for everyone. The watch landed on the film's poster, Pattinson reportedly kept his after the shoot, and Chanel was pleased enough to send watches to Cronenberg and a black Chanel bag to the costume designer, his sister Denise Cronenberg. It suits the film: one grey watch on a man in one grey-and-black suit, worn through a day in which he loses a fortune and, at one point, submits to a prostate exam in the back of the moving car.