Theo James wears a Rolex Submariner

The second season of The White Lotus moves to a resort in Taormina, Sicily, and gives Cameron Sullivan the walk of a man who has never once doubted he belongs there. Theo James plays Cameron, a finance husband on a couples trip with his wife Daphne and his old college roommate Ethan, who has just sold a company and come into real money. Cameron spends the week performing wealth at Ethan, and on his wrist he wears the sharpest prop in that performance: a Rolex Submariner that looks ordinary and is not.

The watch is the reference 116619LB, the version Rolex introduced in 2008 in solid 18-karat white gold, with a blue sunburst dial and a matching blue ceramic bezel that earned it the nickname Smurf. From across a pool it reads as a steel Submariner, the default rich-guy dive watch. In the hand it weighs nearly twice as much and cost around forty thousand dollars new. That gap is the whole point. Cameron's flex is legible only to people who already know what they are looking at, which is exactly the audience he cares about.

Ethan wears a TAG Heuer Connected, a smartwatch, the tell of new money still learning the codes. Cameron wears white gold disguised as steel. The costume team used the two watches to mark which man was raised inside the game and which one just arrived in it.