Cartier Crash: The Complete Guide From the 1960s to Today

As the enduring popularity of pre-worn and “distressed” denim should prove, fashion sometimes embraces wear and tear, or at least the illusion of such, as a bold stylistic statement. The phenomenon can also occasionally be found, albeit perhaps less overtly, in the world of watches. Consider the fascinating case of the Cartier Crash, a watch whose wildly unconventional, “banged-up” shape has made it not just a curiosity but one of the world’s most collectible timepieces — a quirky icon from a watchmaker with no shortage of iconic designs to its credit. The Crash has been around, mostly floating along the periphery of the watch-industry mainstream, since the 1960s, in various iterations, and while it has never achieved the household-name popularity of Cartier watches like the Tank and Santos, it has also never really gone out of style, either. Here is a primer on the Cartier Crash, and perhaps even a little insight on how it has stayed relevant in the marketplace, nearly six decades after its debut.

Photo: Bonhams

Let’s start at the beginning, with one of the main sources of the Crash’s multigenerational appeal, its decidedly lurid and now-debunked origin story. As legend had it, the Crash’s curvy, bent case design was inspired by a fatal automobile accident: the owner of a Cartier Baignoire Allongé — an oval-cased watch, example above — was wearing it when he perished in a fiery car crash (hence the name) and the watch, once recovered from the wreckage, was crunched into an unrecognizable shape. It was the post-accident state of the timepiece that Cartier was trying to emulate, so the story goes, when it created the first Cartier Crash model in 1967. (A slightly more plausible, parallel theory was that the shape was an attempt to re-create the “melting clocks” in Salvador Dali’s famous 1931 Surrealist painting, The Persistence of Memory, below.)

The car-crash story was always dubious — it’s difficult to imagine how such an impact would have bent the case into a different shape, rather than just shattering the crystal and perhaps scorching the strap — but it was officially put to bed only somewhat recently, with the publication of The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire, authored by Francsca Cartier-Brickell, granddaughter of Jean-Jacques Cartier, who ran the firm’s London branch in the 1960s. In the book, Cartier-Brickell reveals that while the Crash was indeed based on the oval-shaped Baignoire, aka the Maxi Oval, it was a deliberate attempt to expand Cartier’s visual identity in tune with the psychedelia-inspired styles that were becoming all the rage in the era we now know as Swinging London.

Jean-Jacques Cartier and his top designer, Rupert Emmerson, worked closely with clients in that non-conformist period, including British film actor Stewart Granger, to produce a watch unlike any ever seen before. Their radical solution was essentially to take the Maxi Oval case, stretch it at the ends to get two pinched points, and add a dent in the middle. Aping the look of a case severely damaged in a crash was certainly the intent: in the original versions, Emmerson even suggested using a cracked crystal over the dial — until this was vetoed by Jean-Jacques, who wisely believed that even such an oddball design needed to be aesthetically pleasing. 

According to Cartier-Brickell in The Cartiers, the gold case for the finished product was made without using a mold, with gold sheets being worked by hand, and took significantly longer to produce than other Cartier cases, which were mostly round, oval, or rectangular. The dial, which Emmerson hand-painted himself, presented its own challenge: lining up the distorted, off-centered Roman numerals with the circular-running hands, in a manner in which the time could actually be read, required multiple disassemblies and re-paintings. As with many Cartier watches at the time, the movement chosen for the first Crash came from Jaeger-LeCoultre, Caliber 841, whose tonneau-shaped dimensions allowed it to fit into the bizarrely twisted case better than a round caliber would have. 

1967: London Crash

Perhaps because it was the brainchild of Cartier’s U.K. team, the first generation of Crash watches — made from 1967 through the early 1990s — bore the designation “London” on their curvy dials and are now widely known in the collectors’ market as “London Crash” models. These original models, with the Jaeger-LeCoultre 841 caliber, were big — 43mm long by 25mm wide, in yellow gold — and produced in very small quantities, as even Cartier knew that the Crash was a watch that had a very niche appeal. Several sources, including Sotheby’s, believe that the initial production run may have been as low as a dozen, with subsequent editions in the 1970s and 1980s being similarly scarce. Additionally, because of the hand-crafted nature of the first editions (remember the lack of a mold for the cases), no two of them were exactly alike, thus enhancing their value to collectors. In 1980, according to Cartier, came the first London Crash models in platinum cases, expanding the artisanal family beyond its original yellow gold. White gold versions followed in the early 1990s, just as production in London was being phased out. London Crash models, as you might expect, are the most valuable in the secondary market, with at least one first edition from 1967 commanding a final price of $1.5 million at auction. 

1991: Paris Crash

Photo: Sotheby's

As per their dials, Cartier Crash watches were made in London, at Cartier’s Bond Street workshop, until about 1991. The second generation, which Cartier began assembling in Paris, accordingly bore “Paris” on their dials. (All Cartier watches are now made in Switzerland, though many designs still originate from Paris.) The first “Paris Crash” came in a 400-piece limited edition in yellow gold, and its case was significantly smaller than that of the London version, at 38mm x 22.5mm. That case carried inside it the manually wound, 17-jewel Caliber 160. This was also the first Crash with Cartier’s “secret signature” incorporated into the Roman numeral “VII” on the dial, and remains, to date, the largest limited edition to emerge from the Crash’s prestigious and peculiar history. In the 1990s, with Cartier now established even more firmly as a jeweler than a watchmaker, the brand introduced the first “Crash Diamonds” editions, in the same case dimensions, with three rows of pavé-set diamonds along the case’s curving, warping sides and a brilliant-cut diamond in the beaded crown. One of the most collectible iterations landed in 1994, the first Crash in an 18k pink-gold case with burgundy-colored Roman numerals on the dial. One model from this 40-piece limited edition sold at a Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction in 2020 for 687,500 HKD. 

2015: Crash Skeleton

While Cartier continued to produce Crash watches in very limited numbers into the new millennium, the company was also exploring bolder, more creative executions of some of its most enthusiast-friendly timepieces, including skeletonized versions. The first Crash Skeleton emerged in 2015, ushering in a new era for the 1960s mainstay that was in its way just as radical as the original. For this watch, cased in platinum and measuring 45.32mm x 28.15mm (the largest ever in the series), not only the case and dial but the movement needed to be shaped to accommodate the unconventional dimensions — in addition to being openworked. Cartier’s manually wound Caliber 9618 MC was cleverly designed in a manner in which its plates and bridges were sculpted into the shapes of the Roman hour numerals; its serially coupled double barrels held a three-day power reserve and its vertically aligned gear train followed the unusual contours of the case. The Crash Skeleton models were limited to 67 pieces, undoubtedly to pay tribute to the year (1967) of the model’s debut. 

2017: Crash Radieuse

In 2017, Cartier introduced the Cartier Libre collection, a series of limited editions all based on Cartier’s oval-shaped jewelry watches of yesteryear. Among the first wave of Cartier Libre models was yet another take on the Crash, called the Crash Radieuse. The watch gets its name from its distinctive dial treatment, with concentric, warped ovals conforming to the case and dial shape radiating from the center to the periphery of the dial. Some reviewers have likened the effect to the “shockwaves” from that mythical automobile collision that allegedly gave birth to the original Crash watch. The effect continues as a stepped texture on the case, which measures 42mm x 23.3mm in yellow gold and houses another manual-winding movement, Caliber 8970 MC, which Cartier now makes in-house (hence the “MC” for “Manufacture Cartier”). That watch was limited to just 50 pieces, continuing the longstanding tradition of rarity as well as sheer design audacity.