Sylvain Berneron has spent three years making a small number of watches that look like nothing else. The Mirage, introduced in 2023, was built the wrong way round on purpose: rather than designing a movement and finding a case for it, Berneron let the shape of the calibre dictate the shape of the watch, which is how a designer who spent years on the creative side of far larger companies arrived at an asymmetric case that flows around its own mechanics. Earlier this month the brand teased the next chapter on Instagram, and Monochrome published what is known so far on 18 August. It is called the Mirage Miroir, and for once the poetic name is a literal description of the engineering.
The Mirage, reflected
The case has not changed. The Mirage Miroir keeps the 38mm asymmetric form of the original Mirage, which Berneron first offered in 38mm and later shrank to 34mm, and which was followed last year by the geometric Quantième Annuel annual calendar. What has changed sits behind the crystal.
Calibre 283
The new Calibre 283 is based on the same fundamental architecture as the Mirage's original Calibre 233, but instead of skeletonising or reworking that movement, Berneron has reproduced its layout as a complete mirror image and turned it to face the dial. The going train, the bridges and the guilloché barrel discs that used to live under the caseback are now the thing you look at when you check the time.
That reorganisation forces two neat solutions. The guilloché sectors are not decoration laid on top of a dial; they are the dial, and their engraved fields double as the points from which the hours are read, in place of applied markers. And to keep the openworked mechanism as legible as possible, Berneron removed the dedicated seconds display altogether, letting the exposed seconds wheel turn as the running indicator instead. The result is a watch whose face is its movement, reflected.
A gold bracelet, and what we do not know yet
The most obvious change on the wrist is the band. Where earlier Mirages ran on leather, the Miroir is shown on an articulated gold bracelet, built from several rows of links including a flexible seven-row section that Berneron teased weeks earlier, before the bracelet flows into the case. It makes the watch read as jewellery without softening the sculptural case.
Berneron's website lists the Mirage Miroir in two versions, yellow gold and white gold, though the white gold watch has not yet been shown in full. Beyond that, the brand is holding back: there is no confirmed price, no stated production run and no full movement specification, all of which Berneron says will come at, or shortly before, Geneva Watch Days. Given how few Mirages have been made to date, the interesting question is not what the Miroir costs but how many people will get the chance to pay it. We will update this piece when the numbers are official.
