Have We Reached Peak Cartier Crash?

Photograph: Cartier; Collage: Gabe Conte

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Tom Brady was the one who broke the dam. A few weeks ago, when the recently roasted QB great wore the Cartier Crash—arguably the defining watch of the past few years, as collectors’ tastes have shifted toward svelter and more audacious designs—I messaged my editor an idea that would have felt heretical just a month earlier: “I'm getting this close to writing a ‘the Cartier Crash is over’ story.”

Even then, it felt a little like touching the third rail. But it turns out that, much like Kendrick Lamar, I wasn’t the only one with beef. As Lamar raps on his recent track “Euphoria”: “It's not just me, I'm what the culture feelin'.” Last week, Hodinkee founder Ben Clymer said, "the Crash is now pedestrian." On Instagram, after Sebastian Stan wore the Rubenesque model to the Met Gala, Brynn Wallner of @Dimepiece wrote, “Okay I love it but the Cartier Crash needs a breather.”

The Crash is a special watch. It wouldn’t have reached this level of hype if it hadn’t already been iconic in the first place. When celebrities like Kanye West and Tyler, the Creator first started wearing the piece in 2019 and 2021, respectively, I rushed to write about it, because it’s a holy grail that speaks directly to what I love most about Cartier and its willingness to produce oddball shapes. “It’s an obsession-worthy watch,” Mike Nouveau, the King of WatchTok and a Cartier evangelist, told me over the phone from Paris. “Cartier never made it in big quantities.”

The Crash’s current status among collectors is really a bigger story about the growing interest in watches and the media around them. “The Crash just ended up at the forefront of attention in articles, photos, Instagram, and TikTok posts,” Nouveau said. “It's overexposed like the Eiffel Tower is overexposed—it's still a special thing that not many people get to experience.” The Crash has been turned into rugs and cookies and printed on merch that’s “as impossible to snag as the watch,” Time & Tide wrote. And yet, just this past month, Guram Gvasalia, the creative director of Vetements, wore two at once! “I thought the Crash was rare?!” Wallner said over email. But in a world where watch collecting is more zeitgeisty than ever, the Crash has become the hobby’s multi-tier cake in the window.

Of late, the Crash has popped up on the wrist of so many celebrities that it’s all but lost the scarcity that made it so special in the first place. What was once a novel symbol of iconoclastic taste suddenly feels—gulp—mainstream. “The Crash has kind of become almost like the [Patek Philippe] Nautilus,” Eric Wind, the founder of Wind Vintage, opined on the phone this week. “It's too much.” It reminds me somewhat of Rolex’s “Paul Newman” Daytona, a watch that Wind helped place in Crazy Rich Asians, which also went from a watch-nerd-only concern to the epitome of rich-dude status symbols.

Quotes like Wind’s underline how quickly a watch can go from iconic to overexposed. Patek felt this so strongly that it put the most desirable version of the Nautilus, the 5711, out of production in fear of it becoming bigger than the brand. Nouveau perhaps put it best: “It’s mood board bait.” At the moment, the Crash is suffering from being too successful as a design: It’s a distinctive watch from a recognizable brand that nearly anyone can appreciate and intuitively understand as unique.

I want to be clear: Unlike Bills fans’ unending misery or the questioning of Bill Belichick’s legacy, Tom Brady is not solely responsible for the Crash jumping the shark. When the former QB wore a platinum 2023 version of the Crash last month, it was like having one bite of that display-window cake too many. What once felt like a sweet celebration was suddenly a sickening overindulgence. Over the past few years, the Crash has traveled far beyond Tyler and Kanye to the wrists of too many celebrities to count. “I wish this watch were reserved for [serious A-listers only],” Wallner said, “if only to sustain its image as untouchable and exquisite.”

We all have our moments that give us the ick. For Wallner, it was one of Nouveau’s recent videos that features an NSO—”New Special Order”—Crash that “really pulled the veil from my eyes,” she said. It wasn’t that the Crash was unattractive, but that whoever originally commissioned it so blithely flipped it to the man in Nouveau’s video. “It just made me feel that the watch is becoming increasingly more sellable—read: disposable,” Wallner said. Wind, unprompted, brought up the same video. “There's an NSO Crash seemingly coming out every two seconds,” he said.

Nouveau pushed back on the idea that the Crash is as pervasive as it appears on the internet. “There are none on the market that I can offer to anybody,” he said. When my logical brain kicks in, I understand this is still a very rare watch—one that most people are still learning about. Wallner writes that she still gets comments from her followers who aren’t familiar with the Crash. “As watch heads, we're still very much in a bubble,” she added. “Something may seem ‘played out’ to us, but when we step outside of this niche, we realize that most people are still in the ecstatic discovery phase.”

The folks buying it aren’t burning out on the Crash either. “The market has gone back up from where it was last year, but still less than peak from a couple years ago,” Adam Golden, the founder of Menta Watches, told me. “I think it’s settled where it’s at.” The data supports Golden’s assertion. Revolution recently put together a comprehensive view of the Crash’s sales at auction and found that while it’s dipped slightly from its peak, prices are still way up from 2018.

Feelings of Crash overexposure largely come from the idea that the wrong people are wearing them. Stan and Brady, for example, don’t seem to match the piece’s vibe. “They’re not known for dressing wacky,” Nouveau said. “This is a fairly wacky watch.” I’d rather see collectors progress like Tyler, the Creator. He started with the Crash and worked his way to Cartier’s other interesting shapes, like the Pebble, Obus, and Duoplan. But when talking to clients interested in the Crash, Nouveau doesn’t find this type of passion in the brand. “In my experience, I haven’t seen someone be like, ‘I want a Crash. No Crash? Okay, I'll try this,’” he said. “I don't think a lot of these people care about Cartier.”

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Originally Appeared on GQ