Vanessa Redgrave wears a Rolex Submariner

In Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), David Hemmings plays Thomas, a fashion photographer who wanders into a London park, photographs what looks like a tryst, and slowly realizes his pictures may show a murder. Vanessa Redgrave is the woman in the park, credited only as Jane, who tracks Thomas to his studio and wants the film back at any price. On her wrist, in most of her scenes, sits a man's steel Rolex Submariner, reference 5513, worn on a black strap and pulled over the cuff of her shirt.

The production bought the watch for ninety pounds at Asprey's on Bond Street, and its afterlife became a small saga of its own. Researchers zooming into 1966 photographs decades later noticed the dial was the rare Explorer type, with Arabic numerals at three, six, and nine, the kind of variant that gets a nickname; one writer suggested that, spotted sooner, it might have been called the Vanessa Redgrave the way a certain Daytona dial became the Paul Newman. The dial itself did not survive: the watch went to Rolex for servicing during its long retirement and came back with a standard replacement. When Bonhams sold the watch in June 2023 for 25,600 pounds, the catalogue noted that the seller, the film's set construction manager, had owned it for over fifty years and was the only person besides Redgrave ever to wear it. The same catalogue read the styling as a statement, comparing Jane's man's watch to Honour Blackman's Rolex GMT as Pussy Galore two years earlier.