The watch strap is a type many call a NATO. Whether it is in fact a NATO is a subject of considerable online debate, like most everything to do with the world of fine watches and Bond.

Named for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, though likely created for the British armed forces, a NATO is classically a length of plain woven nylon with two stainless steel loops and a metal buckle. Like Bond or Galore, it is tough, resilient and hard to kill.

And it is a certifiable trend. At least it was during the huge Baselworld watch fair held in Switzerland in the spring, when large numbers of watchmakers showed their costly wares on NATO straps, and before then on the wrists of Billyburg hipsters, still the most reliable early adopters when it comes to matters of style.

Watch purists hate them. NATO straps “don’t belong on any watch that costs more than the strap,” sniffed one professed online arbiter known as the Watch Snob. For that matter, he added, they have no business supporting any timepiece to which “a leather strap can be attached.”

They make wearers look “cheap,” the Watch Snob concluded, though that view hardly squares with the handsome balance struck by a NATO strap worn with Tudor’s black-faced Heritage Ranger (the camouflage strap woven by the venerable family-owned French ribbon-maker Julien Faure, which also supplies the pope); or the jaunty orange one on Bell & Ross’s signature square Carbon Orange, a watch whose chromatic scheme derives from aviation instrumentation; or the nylon band on Hamilton’s aluminum-cased Khaki Pilot Pioneer; or even that worn with Chopard’s titanium Grand Prix de Monaco Historique.