Amazing to see interest in the Crash Watch continuing to snowball — not sure my grandfather would have believed it. In a way, the Crash Watch was born out of the family motto "Never Copy, Only Create" — the design was ground-breaking in its refusal to follow conventional watch shapes. Neither rectangular, oval, square nor circular, it was bold and different.
Too different for some: ironically, when Jean-Jacques Cartier first released it in Swinging Sixties Cartier London, the unusual shape proved almost too radical for the time and one of the firm's top watch clients, the actor Stuart Granger, was said to have returned his for something more conventional!
Today, over half a century on, if press and celebrity interest and recent auction records are anything to go by, it's become something of a design icon — though a rare one. Just over a dozen of the original London Crashes were ever made under Jean-Jacques Cartier, and since then there have only been a few limited series.
For more, the Hodinkee article "How the Cartier Crash Became The Most Important Vintage Watch of 2021" traces the phenomenon all the way from its origins — in the collaboration between Jean-Jacques and Rupert Emmerson up on the top floors of 175 New Bond Street in the 1960s — to American rapper Tyler the Creator wearing it at a Monaco watch auction recently.
Will vintage Cartier London watch designs sustain this level of interest in the years ahead? What do you think?
