Year In Review How the Cartier Crash Became The Most Important Vintage Watch of 2021

Jacques and Pierre Cartier, grandsons of Louis-François, opened one of the house’s first outposts outside of Paris in 1902. They established a home for Cartier on London’s posh Bond Street, where it remains today. 

Unlike today, where you’ll find floor after floor of retail space with fluorescently lit glass cabinets of watches, jewelry, and other Cartier treasures, this original home of Cartier was a true workshop. On the top floors of the Bond Street townhouse, designers sketched out concepts, crafted jewelry, and took on special orders and commissions from Cartier clientele. Cartier employed goldsmiths, jewelers, and other craftspeople, giving the London workshop the ability to create independently. It even made a few crowns and tiaras for royal coronations.

In these early years, Cartier London would also sell watches from Paris and Switzerland, but it was not yet designing or creating its own timepieces. 

That changed in the mid-1960s, when the head of Cartier London, Jean-Jacques Cartier — the son of Jacques who had founded the London branch at the beginning of the century — decided the branch should produce its own wristwatches, too. This was also after Pierre (Jacques’ brother) died in 1964, which led to the Cartier businesses in New York, Paris, and London being split up.

By the mid-1960s, Cartier London had a newfound independence. But when it opened the doors and stepped outside its Bond Street townhouse, it found itself in the middle of a cultural revolution. 

“To understand the Crash, we have to go back to Swinging Sixties London, when the British capital was at the front of a revolution in fashion, music, and consumer goods,” Francesca Cartier Brickell, author of the excellent book The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire (and granddaughter of Jean-Jacques Cartier), tells us. “As opposed to the 1950s, which had been clouded in post-war austerity and restraint, the 1960s was a decade of rebellion with the young challenging the status quo and wanting to be different from their parents.”

Mods, miniskirts, Mick Jagger — all roamed the streets of London, shocking the city out of its post-war malaise and into the epicenter of style.

“Against this backdrop, it’s clear why a rebellious watch design like the London Crash captured the public imagination,” Brickell says. Sure, it was beautiful, but it was far from stuffy or traditional. One thing was for sure: it was a definite departure from the rigid right angles of Cartier’s most iconic model, a model whose name also happened to evoke dreaded memories of wartime: The Tank.

With the Crash, it’s all about one thing: The design. 

“The design is what really drew me in. There really is no other watch like it. The curves of the case are sensual and soft. The organic free-form shape is unique in the pantheon of watch cases,” says collector and dealer Eric Ku of his long-standing passion for the Crash.

“My passion for this model streams from its mysterious origin story. Although the truth is more mundane, the legend still persists. It’s about as mysterious as a watch can get.”

More mundane perhaps, but a story worth telling, nonetheless. 

According to Cartier Brickell, her grandfather, Jean-Jacques, loved the design process. He could often be found upstairs at Cartier London’s New Bond Street townhouse, in the design studio, the gemstones office, or the English ArtWorks workshop with Cartier’s craftspeople. “He much preferred talking about the creative process than meeting with clients in the showroom,” she says.

When it came to watches, Jean-Jacques’ go-to designer was Rupert Emmerson. The two collaborated together on dozens of watch designs, including the Crash.

“My grandfather explained to me that he had been thinking of how to adapt the Oval (one of the most popular Cartier London watches of the time) to become something new that would suit the more rebellious era of the Swinging Sixties,” Cartier Brickell says. 

“He told me about the idea of taking the oval design and ‘pinching the ends at a point and putting a kink in the middle’ as he put it.” He discussed it with Emmerson, who came up with several variants of the proposed idea (one of them even had a cracked-looking dial to enhance the ‘crash’ effect, but that was going slightly too far for my grandfather!). And so the Crash design was born.”

Even after conceiving of the design, it took Cartier’s team of watchmakers multiple attempts to construct the watch and paint the asymmetrical dial in a way that would allow the time to be read accurately. 

Jean-Jacques admitted that he “caused a lot of headaches” for his head watchmaker, but finally, in 1967, the Cartier Crash was born. Over the next few years, through the early 1970s, it’s thought that less than a couple dozen Cartier Crash examples were created by Cartier London (like Rolex, good luck getting Cartier to comment on how many of its vintage watches were made).

Since then, Cartier has produced the Crash in limited numbers: a limited run of the London Crash in the 1980s here, an extremely limited edition Paris Crash in platinum in the early 1990s there. Perhaps the largest run was a limited edition of 400 from Cartier Paris, in 1991.

For a while, that felt like pretty much the end of the story for the Crash: an oddly shaped watch born out of Cartier London during the ‘60s that might inspire passion in hardcore collectors like Ku, but not much more. 

Then, a few years ago, something happened. Kanye West tweeted a photo of his Crash. Kim Kardashian got one for good measure. Cartier re-issued a modern Crash model, exclusive to its London boutique, seemingly generating more buzz for the vintage version, too. Auction results started creeping up. Suddenly, those 1991 Cartier Paris Crash models that had been selling at auction for $30,000 were selling for $100,000. Then $200,000.

“Us Cartier-heads have been preaching for years about the virtues of the brand. As I have said countless times, Cartier is all about design — it’s their ‘complication’ and no one does it like them. Plus, I think collectors are over the Patek this and Rolex that. If there is any lesson to be learned from recent auction results, it’s that there is a lot more to the world than just Patek and Rolex,” Ku says.

The “recent auction result” on the top of Ku’s mind was Sotheby’s recent sale of an original London Crash for CHF 806,500. It’s only the third London Crash to come to auction publicly in the last 25 years. As far as I can tell, it’s also now one of the most expensive vintage Cartiers to ever sell at auction.

Where does the Crash go from here? It’s hard to imagine there’s more room for it to go up after a London Crash sold for nearly $1 million, but Ku is ready for it.

“Vintage Cartier, and particularly London models are exceptionally rare,” Ku said. “We will see prices continue to rise and interest continue to grow.”

But the Crash has always been more than a celebrity accessory or an eye-popping auction result. It has become an icon, both as a unique design that has withstood generations of changing fashions, and as a reflection of the time in which it was made.

“It’s been wonderful to see the designs created under my grandfather having a revival,” Cartier Brickell says, mentioning how fun it was to see Tyler, the Creator wearing a Crash at the “88 Cartier” auction at Monaco Legends in October.

“My grandfather was an artist at heart. His sense of style and proportion and understanding of classic design principles — while also being brave enough to experiment — was, I think (but I realize I’m biased), second to none.”

More than fifty years later, it’s this impeccable sense of style, buttressed by a bit of bravery, that keeps us coming back to the Crash.

Tony Traina is a watch collector and sporadic watch writer, contributing to publications like A Collected Man and Highsnobiety. He also writes a semi-regular newsletter called Rescapement.