Everything on this watch is a ring except one thing, and that one thing sits low. Reference 278341RBR is the 31mm Datejust in a combination of stainless steel and Everose gold with a domed bezel set with diamonds, and this configuration carries a slate dial with a full Roman sequence whose large VI is set with diamonds, on the Oyster bracelet. The bezel is a ring of stones, the numeral sequence is a ring of gold, and the bracelet is a band running round the wrist. Against all of that, the set VI is a single point of concentrated brightness at six, and it is the only element on the watch that does not repeat itself somewhere else.
Rings are easy to design and a single point is not, because a point has to be placed and a ring only has to be even. Rolex puts the stones inside the large VI rather than distributing them around the hour positions, which keeps the Roman sequence intact and puts the only concentrated brightness on the dial below the hands rather than behind them, so it is never covered at the top of the hour. Six is also the position furthest from the crown and closest to the wearer when the arm is down. The slate ground beneath is a sunray finish, brushed outward from the center so it runs bright on one side and dark on the other, and being the one cool ground on the reference it lets the warm gold of the numerals and the colorless fire of the stones separate from each other rather than reading as the same brightness. Outside the crystal the bezel is a dome rather than a flat ring, its stones set at continuously varying angles so that only an arc is lit at any moment. Everose is alloyed with platinum so its color holds rather than drifting toward yellow over decades. Steel takes the case body and the outer bracelet links while Everose takes the bezel, the crown, the bracelet center rows, the numerals and the hands, all of it solid rather than plated. The Oyster bracelet is three broad flat links, brushed on top with polished flanks, closing on a concealed clasp. On a dome the stones nearest the crystal sit lowest, so at any shallow viewing angle the inner edge of the bezel and the outer edge of the dial appear almost to touch.
Beyond the time the watch does one thing. The date changes instantaneously at midnight rather than creeping through the hours around it, the function the model introduced in 1945 and takes its name from. Its disc is matched to the slate ground, and on a sunray dial that match has to hold across a moving range of brightness rather than against one fixed value. The frame is drawn for a 31mm dial rather than reduced from a larger one so it does not crowd the numerals beside it, and the Cyclops lens above it, fitted since 1953, enlarges the numeral roughly two and a half times. The window sits at three, which puts it on the opposite side of the dial from the set VI and gives the face two points of interest at a right angle to each other rather than one. Correction runs through the winding crown at a dedicated position, without moving the hands and without anything to press at the side of the case. The movement is self-winding with a power reserve of approximately 55 hours, built for a case this narrow rather than carried down from a wider one, since both the barrel and the rotor are smaller and each does proportionally less work. The crown screws down against the case.
The Datejust has run continuously since 1945, when it became the first self-winding wristwatch to show the date through a window on the dial. The 31mm case sits between the 28mm Lady-Datejust and the 36mm original, and the 278000 generation replaced the 178000 series in 2018 with a revised case and bracelet. Rolex registered the name for its steel and gold construction in 1933. Everose arrived in 2005 and most of the dials developed alongside it have been warm, which leaves slate as one of a small number of cool grounds available on the alloy. Setting a single numeral rather than the whole hour ring is likewise a minority arrangement, offered on relatively few references and usually alongside a fully set alternative. Within the generation, 278341RBR is the steel and Everose reference with a diamond-set domed bezel, and 278241 offers the identical dial under a plain dome. On the plain reference the set VI is the only decoration the watch has and carries all of it. Here it is a small deliberate asymmetry on a watch that is otherwise entirely symmetrical, which is a subtler job and arguably a harder one to bring off. Slate is one of three grounds here carrying the enlarged six.
The buyer for this is interested in placement rather than quantity. Nobody chooses a single set numeral for the amount of decoration it represents, since almost none of it is visible past arm's length, and choosing it alongside a diamond bezel makes that clearer still. What it does is break the symmetry of a watch built almost entirely from rings, and it does so at the one position where nothing else on the dial is competing with it. Slate is the right ground for that because slate stays out of the argument, neither warming the stones nor brightening against them. The Oyster bracelet keeps the rest of the watch plain. Buyers arrive here from the plain slate dial under the same bezel wanting one thing added inside the crystal, and occasionally from the fully set marker rings having decided a complete ring on the dial simply repeated what the bezel already said. Both routes end with a buyer who has thought about where a stone goes rather than how many there are.
