Wimbledon has a dress code problem, and I don’t mean the all-white rule. Every year the Royal Box turns into a parade of oversized gold watches doing their best impression of a jewelry counter. So when Andrew Garfield showed up on day six in a pale blue Ralph Lauren suit wearing something genuinely new, the watch crowd noticed before the tennis did.
Courtside, Not Center Court
Garfield was there to watch the tennis with girlfriend Monica Barbaro, marking a year together, and most outlets were focused on the couple’s matching energy and his longer, 70s-leaning hair. But underneath the cuff was the real story: a brand-new IWC Ingenieur Automatic 35, reference IW324902, in a colorway IWC is calling “Pool.” According to Red Carpet Fashion Awards, Garfield is the first person photographed wearing this exact configuration in public, which makes his Wimbledon appearance a genuine watch-world moment, not just a celebrity spotting.
What’s Actually On His Wrist
The Ingenieur has always been IWC’s answer to the Gerald Genta school of integrated steel sports watches, sitting in the same conversation as the Royal Oak and the Nautilus but with its own industrial, engineer’s-tool identity. This new 35mm version leans hard into that legacy while doing something most luxury sports watches refuse to do: getting smaller. At 35.1mm wide and just 9.4mm thick, it wears closer to a vintage reference than the 40mm-plus cases that have dominated the category for two decades.
The dial is the real headline. That aquamarine “Pool” blue sits on the Ingenieur’s signature embossed grid texture, catching light in a way that shifts between turquoise and metallic blue depending on the angle, an effect Red Carpet Fashion Awards compared to classic Tiffany blue. Inside is IWC’s automatic Calibre 47110, running at 28,800vph with roughly 42 hours of power reserve, visible through a sapphire caseback. The whole thing is finished in steel with an integrated H-link bracelet and retails for AUD $16,800.
Reading Into the Choice
Garfield isn’t a longtime IWC ambassador in the way some actors are locked into brand deals, which makes the choice feel personal rather than contractual. Picking a smaller, quieter watch at an event where bigger usually wins says something about where his taste sits: understated, a little vintage-minded, more interested in proportion than presence. Pairing it with soft blue tailoring, whether intentional or not, turned the watch into part of the outfit’s color story rather than a separate statement piece.
What Collectors Should Take From This
For collectors, this is a watch worth watching for two reasons that matter beyond Wimbledon. The industry has been quietly shrinking case sizes after years of going bigger, and colored, textured dials are having a real moment following the Tiffany-dial Nautilus frenzy. The Ingenieur Pool hits both trends in one reference, and now it has a genuine, unpaid celebrity cosign to go with it.
Garfield didn’t just wear a nice watch to a tennis match. He put a brand-new IWC reference on the map before most collectors even knew it existed, and that’s a rarer thing than it sounds.
