Nothing on this watch has a color. Steel, white gold, silver and diamond are four materials and a single temperature. Reference 126284RBR is the 36mm Datejust in a combination of stainless steel and white gold with a diamond-set bezel, and this configuration carries a silver dial with applied baton markers, on the Jubilee bracelet. Every other route through the range puts something warm or something dark into the composition. This one does not, and the result is a watch that has to be read entirely by surface and by shape, since there is no point anywhere on it where one part is a different color from another.
Monochrome is harder to build than it looks, because the eye separates objects by color first and by everything else second. Remove color and every remaining distinction has to carry more. Rolex handles that here through finish. The dial is silver and sunburst-finished, so it moves as one sheet and holds a single value at any given angle. The batons are raised, faceted and polished, so they catch independently and alternate between brighter and darker than the ground beneath them. The case sides are polished, the lug tops brushed, the bezel set with stones that return light from every direction at once. Four treatments of what is essentially one color, and the watch reads as varied because of it rather than despite it. The marker at twelve is doubled, which is the only cue on the face telling the eye which way up the watch is. The Jubilee runs five-piece links, three polished rows down the middle flanked by brushed outer rows, a bracelet designed for this model in 1945 and still closest to it. At 36mm the Datejust sits at the size the model has always been most itself at. The case is polished on the flanks and brushed across the lug tops, so the two treatments meet along an edge running the length of the watch and give the profile a line to be read by. The bezel is white gold rather than steel, which matters less here for color than for the way the metal takes and holds a setting.
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 baton dial the window replaces a marker outright, and because every marker is identical the substitution is invisible, which is never true on a numeral dial where a missing character is missing information. Its disc is silver to match the dial, so the aperture reads as a recess in the same metal rather than as a pale opening, and the printed numeral inside it is the only genuinely dark mark anywhere on the watch. On a face with no color that single dark character carries more weight than it does on any other configuration in the range. The Cyclops lens above it, 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 seventy hours. A stop-seconds function lets the watch be set against a reference rather than approximately, which is the only other thing the movement asks of an owner. The crown screws down.
The Datejust arrived in 1945 as the first self-winding wristwatch to show the date in a window, and the 36mm case has been the model's central size ever since. Rolex registered the name for its steel and gold construction in 1933, and the steel and white gold pairing is the one version of that idea where the two metals are difficult to tell apart at a glance, which is either the point of it or the objection to it depending on the buyer. Within the current 36mm range the white gold bezel appears fluted on 126234 and set with diamonds here, while the all-steel 126200 carries a smooth domed rim and no white gold anywhere. That makes this reference the only route to a stone-set bezel without introducing a warm metal to the watch. Silver with applied batons is the most widely offered dial in the model and appears across every metal it is built in, so on this reference the face is doing the least distinguishing work of any element and the rim is doing the most. The baton layout is the oldest surviving marker set in the model after the Roman one and has never been withdrawn, because it is the arrangement that survives every dial color the Datejust has ever carried. On a watch with no color at all it is also the only marker style that introduces no shape the rest of the design then has to answer for.
The buyer for this wants a watch with stones on it that still reads as an instrument rather than as jewelry, and cool metal throughout is how that gets achieved. A warm case would make the same bezel read as decoration. Steel and white gold keep it reading as brightness. The silver dial completes the argument by refusing to introduce a color the rest of the watch would then have to answer, which leaves a piece that is decorated at the rim and completely neutral everywhere else. The Jubilee is the dressier of the two bracelets and the one with the most articulation, and its alternating polished and brushed rows extend the same finish argument the dial is making down the length of the arm. Buyers arrive here from the fluted 126234 having wanted more at the rim, and from the all-steel 126200 having wanted white gold in the case. A metallic dial shows marks less than a lacquered one, and the bezel sits at the widest point of the case, where wear shows first.
