Almost nothing about this watch has changed since the model was introduced, and that is the reason to buy it. Reference 278274 is the 31mm Datejust in a combination of stainless steel and white gold with a fluted bezel, and this configuration carries a white dial with applied Roman numerals, on the Jubilee bracelet. The date at three changing instantaneously at midnight arrived in 1945. The Jubilee was designed for the model in the same year. The lens over the date came in 1953. The fluted rim predates all of it as a functional device. A buyer choosing this configuration is choosing a set of decisions made between the 1930s and the 1950s and left alone since.
That continuity is not sentimentality, it is the argument. Each of those elements has survived because it works rather than because it is old. The flutes gave a tool purchase to screw the bezel down onto the case and are now cut and polished purely for the way they catch light, which is the one component whose original purpose has gone, and even it earns its place by defining the edge of the watch. The Roman numerals are the oldest marker set the model still carries and the most legible at a small diameter, drawn narrow for the 31mm case and cut back further where they meet the date frame. Against white they read dark from most angles, since a polished surface returns whatever faces it and a room is rarely brighter than white lacquer. The Jubilee runs five-piece links, three polished rows down the middle flanked by brushed outer rows, closing on a concealed clasp folded into the links, and at 31mm the links are among the finest Rolex assembles. 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 the lugs are drawn short enough that the case never looks stubby at this diameter.
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, so the aperture occupies a position the layout already accounted for, and with a white disc behind it the substitution is close to seamless. The window and its lens together take up proportionally more of a 31mm dial than of any larger case in the range, which is the main reason the aperture registers at all on a ground this pale. The Cyclops lens, fitted to the model since 1953, enlarges the numeral roughly two and a half times and does most of the work of finding the date. 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, and a stop-seconds function allows the time to be set precisely rather than approximately. Both of those are original to the design rather than later additions, which is consistent with the rest of the watch and worth noting on a configuration whose whole argument is continuity. 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 fluted rim is the reason a white gold bezel appears on a watch whose case is mostly steel, since the flutes need a metal that holds a crisp edge and takes a deep polish. White with Roman numerals is the most widely distributed dial the model offers, appearing across effectively every metal it is built in, so this configuration is close to the model's default expressed at 31mm. The same reference exists with a diamond-set rim, and the comparison between them is the clearest illustration of the difference between a watch that is recognizable and one that is noticed. Neither is the better watch and the choice says more about the buyer than about the reference. What is worth understanding is that the fluted version is the one the model was built around, and the set version is a variation on it, rather than the two being parallel options introduced together.
The buyer for this is choosing something they will not have to think about again. Every element on it has been in the model for the better part of a century, the dial is the one the watch is known by, and the size is the one that fits. It is the configuration least likely to look dated in twenty years because it has already failed to look dated in seventy. The Jubilee is the more comfortable of the two bracelets at this size and follows a small wrist more closely, and it is the bracelet the model was designed around. Buyers arrive here from the Oyster version having wanted that, and from the colored and set dials having decided they wanted the watch rather than a version of it. A lacquered dial shows dust more readily than a metallic one, white shows a mark soonest of any ground here, and the flutes hold dust in their grooves in a way a smooth rim does not.
