Rolex Datejust II 116300 Stainless Steel Stainless Steel Rhodium Arabic Dial Smooth Bezel Oyster (2016)

Most people picture the Datejust as a dress watch: a fluted gold bezel, a dressy Jubilee bracelet, Roman numerals, a touch of formality. This one is the opposite of all that, and that is exactly its appeal. It is all steel, with a clean smooth bezel, a flat Oyster bracelet, and a dial marked with big, bold, blue Arabic numerals. This is the Datejust dressed down, the model at its most casual, sporty, and effortlessly legible, a watch that trades the boardroom for everyday life.

The dial is where that relaxed character comes through most clearly. It is rhodium, a bright silvery-grey with a soft sunburst that shifts in the light, and across it march large Arabic numerals in a cool, vivid blue. Those blue numbers are the whole personality of the watch: sporty, highly legible, and lively, a pop of colour against the neutral silver that makes the watch feel modern and energetic rather than formal. Where Roman numerals or slim batons would read as dressy, these full Arabic numerals read as confident and easygoing, a face you can take in at a glance, more like a sports watch than a classic Datejust. The hands are filled with luminous material, a date sits at three beneath the little Cyclops magnifying lens on the crystal, and the whole dial has a clean, uncluttered, contemporary feel.

The rest of the watch is pitched the same way. The bezel is smooth and domed, a clean bright ring with none of the fluting that makes a Datejust look dressy, and the bracelet is the Oyster, the flat, broad, three-link band that is the sportier and more robust of Rolex's options, rather than the dressier Jubilee. In all steel, with no gold and no gem-set anything, this is the most understated and versatile configuration the Datejust comes in, a watch equally at home with a T-shirt or a jacket, on a weekend or at work, the kind of watch you put on and simply never think about taking off.

This is the Datejust II, the larger, bolder version of the model, grown to a generous forty-one millimetres from the classic thirty-six. That bigger case gives the watch real wrist presence and a more modern, masculine feel, the Datejust scaled up for a contemporary taste for larger watches, and it suits the sporty, casual character of this steel-and-blue-Arabic configuration perfectly, substantial and confident on the wrist.

Underneath the relaxed styling, though, it is a Rolex to the core, built to the same obsessive standard as any watch the company makes. It is built on the Oyster case, with its screw-down crown and sealed back making it genuinely waterproof and robust, and it runs on a self-winding movement certified to Rolex's Superlative Chronometer standard, accurate and durable and engineered to run for decades of daily wear. The date clicks over crisply at midnight, the complication that gave the Datejust its name when, in 1945, it became the first self-winding wristwatch to show the date in a window on the dial, an idea so useful the whole industry copied it. All of that serious engineering simply comes dressed, here, in its most casual clothes.

That is what makes this Datejust II so appealing. It takes one of the most classic and recognisable watches in the world and strips it of all its formality, rendering it in plain steel with a clean smooth bezel, a robust Oyster bracelet, and a bright rhodium dial lit by bold blue Arabic numerals, so that the dress watch becomes an everyday one. Larger and more modern at forty-one millimetres, legible and sporty and endlessly versatile, yet built to the same standard and carrying the same history as any Datejust, it is the everyday steel Rolex at its most relaxed and wearable, a watch made not to be admired on special occasions but to be lived in.