admin This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Sign up here.
2023 has been a really great year for watches. At the tippity-top you have Rolex releasing an emoji-laden Day-Date, and on the other end of the spectrum Blancpain launched sea-slug inspired pieces with Swatch. But it’s not just the watch-world stalwarts who are having fun. In 2023, a host of exciting new brands have emerged—both from industry legends and fresh-faced newcomers alike.
A couple of these upstart brands represent the early returns of a growing collecting community. It’s a theory Mark Cho, the owner of Drake’s and the Armoury and a top-notch watch collector, has been floating out there: “(New collectors) are the ones who are going to shape the future of collecting,” he said during a recent GQ chat. “Just the fact that there’s all this extra interest in watches means that there’ll be other people who want to enter the industry, who want to make watches, want to design new things, and it just makes the whole ecosystem richer, more interesting, more variety, more ideas.”
Some of these companies, however, were founded by folks who have risen through the ranks of some of the biggest watchmakers in Switzerland. For instance…
The shapeshifter
Really the entire conceit of this newsletter is an excuse to write about Berneron. It’s the side hustle of Sylvain Berneron, the chief product officer of Breitling, who previously worked at BMW, Porsche, and Ducati. He’s spent the past two years developing his namesake label’s debut watch, the Mirage, which comes in both yellow and white gold. The oddball design certainly has its detractors. Chris Hall made me laugh when he described it as “a chocolate left in a coat pocket,” in his newsletter The Fourth Wheel. But the Mirage floored me. The watch has such movement: The numerals look like they’re being pulled into an unrelenting whirlpool, and even the bent and crooked hands look like they’re only just resisting the riptide. If I wanted to get philosophical as a softie new-ish dad, I might say the watch looks like a reminder of how quickly time moves.
The lazy comparison for the Mirage is the Cartier Crash, with which it shares a certain mushy quality. But I think a better fit is the work of boundary-pushing designer Gilbert Albert, who was responsible for some of Patek Philippe’s funkiest designs from the mid-20th century and a great lover of asymmetry. (Berneron has cited him as an inspiration.) Critically, unlike the Crash—which has an entirely oozing, liquid shape—both Albert and Berneron’s watches seem to be rebelling and kicking out from their more conservative boundaries. These are watches nearly imploding with energy. So, yeah, I really love this piece. I’m not alone: Berneron will only make 24 of the roughly $55,000 watches over the next decade, and all of them have already been claimed.
