Sveva Alviti wears a Rolex Datejust

Dalida was born Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti in Cairo in 1933 to Italian immigrant parents, won Miss Egypt in 1954, moved to Paris, and sold more than 140 million records before her suicide in 1987. Lisa Azuelos's biopic, premiered in Paris in late 2016, traces the whole arc with the Italian actress Sveva Alviti in the title role, Riccardo Scamarcio as her brother and manager Orlando, and Alessandro Borghi as Luigi Tenco, the musician whose suicide at the 1967 Sanremo festival shadowed the rest of her life. The production dressed Alviti seriously: Chopard partnered with the film and covered her in Haute Joaillerie creations on screen and at the premiere.

The watch is where the wardrobe stumbled, according to the one outlet that noticed it. Montres-de-Luxe spotted a steel Rolex Datejust 36 on Alviti's right wrist, appearing only fleetingly across a few scenes, and objected on historical grounds: it is highly unlikely the real Dalida wore a steel watch of that size, because in the seventies and eighties no woman wore big watches, and period photographs show Dalida herself in small gold Lady Datejusts. The brand is right and the watch is wrong. The Datejust line, introduced in 1945 as the first self-winding chronometer to change its date automatically, was certainly part of Dalida's world; the version the costume department chose belonged to a different wrist.