Sigourney Weaver wears a Seiko Giugiaro Chronograph

Ellen Ripley wakes up from 57 years of cryogenic stasis to find herself in a corporate debriefing room, trying to convince Weyland-Yutani that the alien she described after the destruction of the Nostromo was real. Nobody believes her until a colony on LV-426 goes silent. Sigourney Weaver plays her in James Cameron's Aliens (1986), and the watch on her wrist - asymmetric, black, with chronograph pushers grouped into a block on the right side of the case - is one of the most recognized props in science-fiction film.

The watch is a Seiko 7A28-7000, designed in 1983 by Giorgetto Giugiaro. Giugiaro is better known for cars - the DeLorean DMC-12, the original Volkswagen Golf, the BMW M1, the Lotus Esprit, the Maserati Ghibli. The Seiko was a side project, but the car-design instincts are visible: the case isn't symmetrical, the pushers don't try to disguise themselves, and the whole watch reads as a single sculpted object rather than a watch with separate parts bolted on. Inside is the Seiko Caliber 7A28, the world's first analog quartz chronograph movement, with four stepping motors and the ability to time down to a tenth of a second.

Collectors call it the Ripley. Seiko has reissued it several times in the decades since the film, never quite getting the same shape exactly right, because the original was specifically a 1983 industrial-design object that happened to land on Sigourney Weaver three years later. It's a watch that was strange-looking before the film and stranger-looking after. That's part of why it has lasted.