Two bright things on a dark watch, one at the rim and one at six, and nothing in between. 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 Oyster bracelet. The ground is the darkest and coolest the reference offers. Against it the lit faces of the flutes are the brightest thing outside the crystal and the stones in the enlarged six are the brightest thing inside, and between those two points the watch is dark, since the ten plain numerals sit at a middle value and the bracelet is broad and mostly brushed.
Isolating the bright points that way gives the dial a structure it would not have on a paler ground. The eye finds the rim first, since it is larger and at the perimeter, then drops to the six, and the ten plain characters are read afterwards as the set they belong to rather than as competitors. On silver or pink that order collapses because everything sits within a narrow range and nothing leads. Here the hierarchy is unmistakable and it runs from the outside in. The remaining 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 because the original cut was deep rather than shallow the shaded faces go properly dark, which against aubergine means the rim itself alternates between bright and near-invisible around its own circumference. The Oyster bracelet is three broad flat links, brushed across the top with polished flanks, closing on a concealed clasp. 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, which puts the brighter of the two bright elements at the broadest part of 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 on this layout the aperture at three and the enlarged six are the two departures from an otherwise regular set, sitting a quarter apart so that both fall in the lower half of the dial. The disc is matched to the aubergine ground rather than left white, which does more on a dark cool face than on any other, since a pale disc would be bright enough to compete with the set numeral and would break the hierarchy the dial is built on. The window and its lens together take up proportionally more of a 31mm dial than of any larger case in the range. The Cyclops lens, fitted to the model since 1953, enlarges the numeral roughly two and a half times, which counts on a dark ground where a small printed character is otherwise hard to find. 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. 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. Aubergine is among the newer colored lacquers in the model and the only genuinely cool dark ground this reference offers, which is why it pairs with white gold more convincingly than it would with a warm alloy and why the stones on this dial read blue-white rather than warm. The enlarged and set numeral appears across several grounds and under both rim types at this diameter, so a buyer can see the same character behaving quite differently depending on what surrounds it. Under a ring of stones the six is one bright element among many. Under flutes it is one of only two, and the difference is larger than the specifications suggest. Anyone weighing the two should look at them together rather than in sequence, since the question is how many bright points the watch has rather than how many stones, and that is not a quantity any specification records. Aubergine is one of two grounds at this reference that exist only in set form, mother-of-pearl being the other, and it takes the large Roman six that dark grey and pink also carry.
The buyer for this wants a dark watch with two points of light in it and has chosen the rim that keeps the count low. That is a real preference rather than a compromise, since the set-bezel version of the same dial is available and produces a considerably busier object. Here the watch reads as near-black with a bright edge and a single bright character, and everything else recedes. The Oyster is the flatter and more structural of the two bracelets and keeps the lower half of the piece out of the composition. Buyers arrive here from the set-bezel reference having wanted fewer stones rather than more, and from the plain aubergine Roman dial having wanted one thing to happen on the face. A lacquered dial shows dust more readily than a metallic one, and the flutes hold dust in their grooves in a way a smooth rim does not.
