Iconic Wristwatch Designs

The watch designs that everyone else copies, shown as objects rather than as accessories on a wrist. To earn a photo here, a design has to be instantly recognizable from its case, dial or bezel alone, and its shape has to have outlived the year it appeared, either because the maker still sells a close descendant or because half the industry borrowed it. Price was not part of the test. A steel sports watch that costs as much as a car sits next to a resin digital that costs less than lunch, because both changed what a watch is expected to look like. The photos run roughly in order of introduction, from early wristwatches made for an aviator and for polo-playing officers, through the dive, racing and space watches of the 1950s and 1960s, to the quartz, plastic and smart designs that put a watch on every wrist.