Most Audacious Watch of the Year

 

How Sylvain Berneron Created the Most Audacious Watch of the Year

The independent watchmaker took home a GPHG award for his unusually shaped Mirage timepiece.

Earlier this month, at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie in Geneva, a.k.a. the Oscars of watchmaking, Sylvain Berneron stood on stage at the Théâtre du Léman before a crowd of some 1,400 people and accepted the Audacity Prize for his Mirage timepiece, a sublime example of shaped watchmaking that he spent nearly $900,000 of his own money to develop.

 
In his acceptance speech, Berneron, an industrial designer who’d worked at Breitling for five years before pursuing his own endeavor, remarked on the perseverance the project required and the risks he took to bring the Mirage to market.
 
“There is a real form of self-endangerment which is the foundation of artistic art,” he said. “I would also like to thank my team with whom I work. I was able to start by surrounding myself with their courage.”
 
On the morning after the awards, I met Berneron and his wife, Marie-Alix, for breakfast at the Beau Rivage hotel on Geneva’s lakefront, where he told me about the journey to making the original 38 mm Mirage as well as the smaller 34 mm stone-dial version he introduced at Geneva Watch Days in late August. He kicked off the conversation with a potent anecdote about how, in the earliest stage of his work on the Mirage, a supplier who also happened to be a friend tried to talk him out of making the timepiece, implying that carrying on with his plan would be akin to professional suicide. That Berneron defied the warning and instead committed himself entirely to the project seems like the very essence of audacity. Below, he talks about why he thinks making art requires some “personal endangerment,” how the Mirage is like “an offering to God,” and what collectors and fans of his work can look forward to seeing from Berneron in 2025.