The dial is the only dark thing on this watch, and everything around it is polished. Reference 278274 is the 31mm Datejust in a combination of stainless steel and white gold with a fluted bezel, and this configuration carries an aubergine dial with Roman numerals, the six drawn oversized in solid white gold and set with diamonds, on the Jubilee bracelet. A fluted rim above, a five-piece Jubilee below whose polished rows run the length of the arm, a polished case flank on either side, and in the middle a near-black lacquer. The watch is bright everywhere except at its middle, which is an unusual distribution and the reason this configuration looks deeper than its specification reads.
Enclosing a dark ground in bright metal changes how deep it appears. The same aubergine on the Oyster reads as a dark face with a bright edge, since three broad brushed links give the eye somewhere neutral to rest and the contrast is confined to the rim. The Jubilee removes that resting place. Polished rows alternate with brushed ones the whole way down, so brightness surrounds the dial on every side and continues past the case, and the ground reads as a well rather than as a surface. The enlarged six sits at the bottom of it, the one bright element inside the crystal, and the stones in it separate hard against a ground this dark. The ten plain numerals are polished white gold, drawn narrow for the 31mm diameter and cut back further where they meet the date frame. The fluting began as a functional device, giving a tool purchase to screw the bezel down onto the case, and is now cut and polished purely for the way it catches light. The case is polished on the flanks and brushed across the lug tops, the lugs are short relative to the case, and every gold element is solid rather than plated. The bracelet tapers continuously from the end links so the widest point of the whole watch is the bezel, and on a case this size the taper is steep enough to see from directly above, which adds to the sense of the dial sitting down inside the piece.
The watch does one thing beyond telling the time. The date changes instantaneously at midnight rather than creeping through the hours around it, the function the Datejust introduced in 1945 and the one the model takes its name from. On a Roman dial the window replaces a numeral rather than interrupting a ring of identical markers, and here the aperture at three and the enlarged six sit a quarter apart, both in the lower half of the dial. The disc is matched to the aubergine ground so the opening does not brighten, and the printed numeral inside it is the only element on the face that is neither stone nor polished metal nor lacquer. The window and its lens together take up proportionally more of a 31mm dial than of any larger case in the range, which on a dial being read as a well rather than a surface makes the aperture the one place the depth is interrupted. The Cyclops lens, fitted to the model since 1953, enlarges the numeral roughly two and a half times. Correction runs through the winding crown at a dedicated position and leaves the hands where they are. The movement is self-winding with a power reserve of approximately fifty-five hours, the figure the smaller cases carry rather than the longer one fitted to the 36mm, so the calendar survives a weekend off the wrist. A stop-seconds function allows the time to be set precisely. The crown screws down and the bracelet closes flush against the case.
The Datejust arrived in 1945 as the first self-winding wristwatch to show the date in a window, and the 31mm case sits between the 28mm Lady-Datejust and the 36mm that has always been the model's central size. Rolex registered the name for its steel and gold construction in 1933. The Jubilee was designed for this model in 1945 and changes character with the diameter more than the Oyster does, becoming finer and more jewelry-like as the case shrinks, so at 31mm it surrounds a small dial with more polished metal than at any larger size. Aubergine is the only genuinely cool dark ground the reference offers, and pairing the two produces the greatest contrast between dial and surround available here. That is worth choosing deliberately rather than arriving at, since the same dial on the Oyster is a materially calmer watch and both are offered for that reason. It is one of the clearer cases in the range of a bracelet changing what a dial does rather than merely what it sits on, and it is worth handling the pair rather than choosing between them on a list, since the specifications differ by a single word and the watches do not.
The buyer for this wants depth rather than brightness and has understood that the way to get it is to put brightness around it. That is a slightly counterintuitive route and the people who take it usually do so having seen both bracelets together and found the Oyster version flatter than they expected. What they get is a small watch whose dial appears to sit further below the crystal than it does, with one set character at the bottom of it. Buyers arrive here from the Oyster version wanting more contrast, and from the paler grounds having decided they wanted the dial to be the dark part rather than the bright one. A lacquered dial shows dust more readily than a metallic one, the gold is solid rather than plated, and the flutes hold dust in their grooves in a way a smooth rim does not, which a soft brush deals with and which is the only upkeep the bezel ever asks for.
