ylvain Berneron was born in Versailles, 35 years ago. His father, an IT engineer and mechanic by passion, transmitted his love of precision, cars, motorbikes and watches. His mother, an amateur painter, instilled in him an artistic sense and a thirst for creativity. He did a baccalauréat in Applied Arts, then a year at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, before going on to study industrial design, the discipline which attracted him most.

His first decisive opportunity took him into the automotive industry: “In the middle of my studies, I won an industrial design competition that enabled me to do a six-month internship at BMW,” he recounts. “So they took me out of school and put me in their R&D centre in Munich as a Werkstudent. I was 19, I didn’t speak German, I worked 35 hours a week for them and in the evening I worked for my university course in Munich to validate my Master’s degree in industrial design.”

Sylvain Berneron

The six months he spent there taught him discipline and a precise sense of design. But, as he also admits: “I soon got frustrated with the lack of creative freedom, which was mainly down to all the constraints in terms of pollution, safety and cost reduction. You can see it too, virtually all cars look the same…”

The Fibonacci sequence, a reference for an ideal of beauty inspired by nature, also served in the design of the Mirage 38 by Sylvain Berneron.

Head-on collision between engineering and art

The desire for change prompted him to create his own design company in Paris in 2012. He carried out freelance assignments for automotive companies, motorbikes… and watchmakers, working, for example, on the IWC Ingénieur Chronograph Nico Rosberg. “That led to me being hired by Richemont in Meyrin for nearly five years, where I worked on designs for Baume & Mercier, Jaeger-LeCoultre and IWC,” he explains. “Then I followed Georges Kern to Breitling, where I helped redesign virtually the entire portfolio.”

The Mirage Sienna in 18ct yellow gold, winner of the GPHG Audacity Prize in 2024

Though an industrial designer by training and by choice, horology has in fact always been part of his life. “I grew up surrounded by watches and motorbikes,” he remembers. “My father and his brothers were watch fans – not in the way you see today, putting watches almost on a pedestal. They were into useful watches, tool watches like the Omega Speedmaster or the Rolex Submariner. I played with their watches in the garden. I pushed the buttons and turned the bezels without worrying about whether I was scratching or dirtying them. Watch status has totally changed since then!”

The Mirage Sienna also exists in 18ct gold. The asymmetrical shape of the case evolved from the architecture of the movement.

How did he come to create his own brand? “My first watchmaking assignments aroused my natural appetite. I realised that a watch is a perfect blend of engineering and art, and that it offers a thrilling, head-on collision between these two worlds. Even so, I’d never really considered creating my own brand. I like the idea of influencing the design of a brand, but respecting its DNA soon proved restrictive. It was that creative frustration that pushed me to launch Berneron.”

And what a good thing he did. Today, on the strength of his Audacity Prize at GPHG 2024, the Mirage 38 has found its market. Order books for the Mirage 34 are full until 2028 and the unleashed creativity of Sylvain Berneron is set to continue, with a new collection of calendar watches due to be released in 2025.