A rare yellow-gold timepiece has just fetched almost $2 million to set a new record for the most valuable Cartier wristwatch ever sold at auction. It was neither a coveted Cartier Tank nor a custom creation by the French luxury house, however. The record-breaker at last week’s Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction was, instead, one of the watch market’s unlikeliest hot-ticket items: a Cartier Crash.
Straight out of the swinging ’60s, the Crash’s dripping shape looks more like one of Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist melting clocks than a luxury timepiece. Yet, despite its mechanical simplicity and diminutive size, the rare model is increasingly prized by collectors and sought after by stars from Timothée Chalamet to Kim Kardashian in recent years.
The Crash’s allure may be partly down to an — albeit apocryphal — origin story that’s as unusual as its warped, asymmetric case.
The legend begins in 1967 London, when a customer arrived at Cartier’s New Bond Street boutique to repair a watch damaged in a car accident. The fiery heat of the crash had (or so the story goes) melted its once-oval case. Jean-Jacques Cartier, the great-grandson of founder Louis-François Cartier, was “so seduced by the shape” that he “decided to reproduce it,” the company claims in marketing materials shared with CNN.
Few are convinced by this tale — not least Jean-Jacques’s granddaughter Francesca Cartier Brickell, whose account is more straightforward. In her 2019 book “The Cartiers,” she wrote that her grandfather and designer Rupert Emmerson adjusted the already-popular Cartier Maxi Oval model for loyal clients demanding unique, custom-designed watches. They realized a metal case could be made to look “as though it had been in a crash” by “pinching the ends at a point and putting a kink in the middle,” she added.
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