Every stone on this watch is inside one numeral. Reference 278274 is the 31mm Datejust in a combination of stainless steel and white gold with a fluted bezel, and this configuration carries a pink dial with Roman numerals, the six drawn oversized in solid white gold and set with diamonds, on the Oyster bracelet. On the set-bezel references a dial like this is one decorated element among several, with a ring of stones at the rim doing the obvious work and the enlarged six adding a detail inside the crystal. Here there is no ring. The bezel is fluted, the bracelet is plain, the other ten numerals are unadorned, and the entire stone content of the watch sits within a single character at six o'clock.
Concentrating it that far changes what the setting is for. Distributed across a rim, stones are brightness and the eye reads them as a quantity. Gathered into one numeral they become a detail, and a detail is something a person finds rather than something they are shown. That is why this configuration reads as considerably more restrained than the same dial under a set rim despite carrying the same enlarged six. The pink is kept pale and slightly cool rather than saturated, which means the stones have relatively little to separate against and the six is registered first by its size and only afterwards by what fills it. The remaining characters 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 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, and on a case this size the taper is steep enough to see from directly above.
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 rather than opposite so that both fall in the lower half of the dial. The disc is matched to the pink ground rather than left white, which on a pale dial has to be closer than on a dark one since any discrepancy sits in plain sight. 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, and on a face already carrying one oversized character it is the second element competing at that scale. 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. Rolex keeps two separate pink-family lacquers and never mixes them, a warmer rose confined to the Everose references and this cooler pink for the steel and white gold cases, so the ground here was mixed for a cool case rather than borrowed from the warm side of the range. The enlarged and set numeral appears across several grounds and both rim types on the 31mm cases, which makes it possible to see what each variable contributes. Against a fluted rim the six is the only stone content on the watch. Against a set rim it is the inner and smaller half of a pair. The same character, two quite different roles. Anyone weighing the two should be clear which they are after, because the specifications differ by one line about the bezel and the watches differ by considerably more than that. Three grounds at this reference take the large Roman six, pink among them with aubergine and dark grey, while four grounds carry diamond hour markers instead and both bracelets stay open on all of them.
The buyer for this wants a single piece of decoration and wants to choose where it goes. Most decorated watches place it at the rim, which is the most visible position and the least personal. Putting it inside a numeral at six puts it in the part of the dial the wearer looks at and nobody else does, and pairing that with a fluted bezel keeps the outside of the watch entirely conventional. The Oyster completes the reading by keeping the bracelet plain. Buyers arrive here from the set-bezel version having decided a ring of stones was more than they wanted, and from the plain pink Roman dial having wanted one thing to happen on the face. A lacquered dial shows dust more readily than a metallic one and a pale ground shows it soonest, 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 either the rim or the setting ever asks for.
