Diamonds on the bezel, diamonds on the lugs, and a plain white dial with Roman numerals. Reference 128395TBR is the 36mm Day-Date in Everose gold with the setting running across the bezel and continuing onto the lugs, and this configuration leaves the dial entirely alone: no stones, applied Roman numerals, a flat white ground. It is the most deliberate arrangement in the reference, because every other configuration extends the setting onto the dial and this one draws a hard line at the dial edge. What results is a watch with an unmistakable structure, a bright frame around a clean white center.
The 36mm case is Everose gold, the alloy Rolex introduced in 2005 with its copper content stabilized so the pink tone holds permanently rather than drifting toward yellow. The TBR designation marks the setting arrangement: diamonds in place of the fluting on the bezel, continuing onto the lugs where the case meets the bracelet, which changes the watch from the side as much as from above because the stones follow the case line rather than stopping at the bezel edge. The white dial is a flat, bright lacquer rather than a sunray, and the flatness is functional here: a metallic finish would catch light from the surrounding stones and blur the outlines of the applied numerals. The numerals themselves are applied rather than printed, standing above the surface with enough relief to cast shadow, and each character carries internal angles that have to be cut and polished individually, which is harder work than a baton and more visible when it goes wrong. The day is spelled in full at twelve, the date at three under a magnifying lens. The President bracelet is Everose gold with semi-circular three-piece links and a concealed folding Crownclasp. Applied Roman characters are harder to execute than batons, because each carries internal angles that must be cut and polished individually and a numeral fractionally off vertical shows in a way a misaligned baton does not, and on a flat white dial with nothing else on it that work is the entire finish.
The functional set is a day of the week spelled in full and an instantaneous date, with secure rapid-setting for both and a stop-seconds function for setting the time exactly, unchanged since 1956. The Day-Date was the first wristwatch to display the day as a complete word rather than an abbreviation or a numeral, which required a disc larger than existing calendar layouts could accommodate, and the movement was designed around that rather than adapted from something already in production. Both indications jump instantaneously at midnight rather than creeping through the change over several minutes. Day discs are offered in a wide range of languages and are fixed to the individual watch at manufacture rather than selectable by the owner. Adjustment runs through a screw-down crown with a double sealing system, with no correctors on the case flank and nothing requiring a tool. The self-winding movement carries approximately seventy hours of power reserve. Eleven grounds are built at this reference and that display never changes beneath any of them, so the dial and its markers carry the whole of the difference. White is one of three grounds here that can be had without stones and one of two never offered set at all, olive green being the other.
Roman numerals have been on Day-Date dials since the model's early decades and have consistently been ordered by a smaller share of buyers than index markers, which makes them the quieter of the two conventions rather than the more decorative one. Combining them with a fully set case is uncommon, because buyers at that level of setting generally extend the stones onto the dial as a matter of course. Rolex offers this dial without setting across the Everose gold range, on the fluted-bezel 128235 and here, which makes the unset dial a consistent option rather than an anomaly on one reference. Within the Everose gold 36mm range the 128395TBR sits above the 128345RBR, which carries a set bezel without the lug setting. Diamonds on the lugs sit where the case meets a cuff and take more contact than the bezel does, so factory seats cut into the gold matter more here than anywhere else on the watch, and verifying that the lug stones are original is the first check on any TBR reference. Within the reference eight grounds exist in set form alone, four take framed markers with baguettes at six and nine, three take ten baguette cuts, two take Roman numerals and the paved dial takes sapphires. That leaves the plain end of the roster the smaller half by a wide margin.
This is bought by collectors who want the case decorated and the dial left as a dial, which is a coherent position and a less common one than it should be. Keeping the dial white and unset gives the watch something none of the fully set configurations have: a clear focal point and a boundary between the setting and the face. It suits buyers who find gem-set dials busy and plain-bezel watches insufficient, and collectors who want a heavily set Day-Date that still reads at a glance. White with Roman numerals is also the most conventional dial in the model's vocabulary, so pairing it with the most emphatic setting arrangement in the range produces a deliberate contradiction rather than an accident. A final point concerns how the watch ages as a design. White with Roman numerals has been correct on this model for seventy years and depends on no preference that can move, while the setting arrangement above it is emphatically of the present moment. Pairing the two produces something that will read as dated in one respect and permanent in another, and collectors who buy it are generally comfortable with that split rather than unaware of it.
