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The Calculated Chaos Of The Cartier Crash

Watchmaking’s happiest non-accident.

Jack Forster9 Min ReadJuly 7 2023

Writing about something that’s a cultural institution comes with certain philosophical problems. The biggest one is probably that it becomes almost impossible to write about, say, the Mona Lisa, or dinner at Le Bernardin, or Brancusi’s Bird In Space, or the watchmaking of Philippe Dufour (to pick an example a little closer to home) without ending up writing more about what the object has come to symbolize rather than about the object itself. This is not to say that what you should shoot for is something purely descriptive but it does mean that it is sometimes hard to see the object with fresh eyes, rather than through fame, or hype, tinted goggles.

Interestingly enough a lot of cultural icons didn’t start out that way. There are any number of examples from the fine art world, where what are now obligatory stops in the world’s greatest museums started out as art that rebelled against accepted norms, and were for many years marginalized until tastes evolved to not only accept them, but also to see how they could enrich the larger vocabulary of artistic expression. This is all by way of saying that revolutions tend to become institutions as time goes by, and one of the best examples is the watch we’re looking at for this installment of A Watch A Week: The Cartier Crash.

Zoom InCartier Crash

Every hero needs an origin story and so it is with the Crash, about whose fiery birth a legend has accreted. The story is a fabrication, but beautiful, like a pearl that has accumulated around an irritant.

The story is as familiar to every watch enthusiast as Spider-Man’s radioactive arachnid and hapless Uncle Ben are to Marvel comics fans. It is said that one day, during the uproar and tumult of the Swinging Sixties, a Cartier executive got into an automobile accident while wearing an oval Cartier watch – I’ve heard different versions of the story featuring different watches but where the story is recorded, it’s often said to be a Baignoire Allongée.  The watch was distorted by the impact of the accident as well as the heat of the resulting fire and this somewhat macabre event was what gave rise to the Crash itself.

Zoom InCartier Crash

The legend is despite its apparent absurdity actually marginally plausible. The fine folks at the journal, Case Studies In Thermal Engineering, published an article entitled, “Flame spread and smoke temperature of full-scale fire test of car fire,” back in 2017, for which two test cars were set on fire (I will never not love the deadpan tone of research papers: “Full-scale experiments using two 4-door sedan passenger cars, placed side by side in the reverse direction, were carried out to establish the burning behavior and describe the spread of fire to adjacent car.”) The temperature inside the passenger compartments reached 900º Celsius which is pretty close to the melting point of gold – just enough to produce a surrealistic distortion of the Baignoire Allongée case.

“You Say You Want A Revolution” –The Beatles, 1968

The real story is more prosaic but no less interesting. Francesca Cartier Brickell is the author of the definitive history of the Cartier family, The Cartiersand the granddaughter of Jean-Jacques Cartier, the last member of the family to run the original London boutique in New Bond Street, which opened in 1909. According to the book, Jean-Jacques came up with the idea for the Crash in response to requests from Cartier’s clients to create a watch more in tune with the zeitgeist than the very formal designs which had since the beginning of the 20th century, been Cartier’s stock in trade. Cartier Brickell wrote, “The reality was that the 1960s were a time of non-conformism in London … Jean-Jacques, who worked closely with designer Rupert Emerson on watches and cases, discussed with him how they might try adjusting the popular Maxi Oval (Baignoire Allongée) design to look as though it had been in a crash.”

Automobile accidents exert a strange fascination. They seem to have a Promethean allure – our monsters turning on us, the servants crushing their masters, the irresistible idea that in some way the accident is the logical outcome of human hubris. All the J. G. Ballard fans out there know what I’m talking about. Maybe that’s part of the reason that the obviously absurd mythical origin story of the Crash seems to persist against all logic and reason – that little whiff of flesh reaching its apotheosis in its destruction.

The Crash is so much an icon and an institution these days that it is easy to forget that it was not, for quite a long time, and the corollary to that is that it’s a very weird watch. That it actually works is a testament to just how sophisticated the design actually is, and how easy that is to miss.

Zoom InCartier Crash

We think of the Crash as a design icon so reflexively that the violently asymmetric aspects of the watch can slip by unnoticed. If you let your eye travel around the contours of the case (our watch this week is a Paris Crash made in the early 1990s and one of a series of 400 sold through the Rue de la Paix boutique) you’ll notice that the thickness, width, and contours of the case change continuously as you go around the outer surface of the watch. The case has a liquid quality to it, with a sharp pinch at about 4:00 offset by a prominent,  tumescent bulge between 7:00 and 8:00. The pinch and the bulge offset each other almost but not quite symmetrically and the visual effect is indeed as if something had struck the watch on the right side of the case, causing it to protrude on the left.

The case comes to a sharp point at the bottom and top. Here again, there is an easy to miss asymmetry essential to the effectiveness of the design. The top apex is on the long vertical axis of the watch but the bottom one is not; in fact it sits right at the outer tip of the thicker V of the Roman numeral five, and the VI– Roman numeral six – is not in its right place at the bottom of the dial, on the vertical axis, but is instead offset to the left. If you draw a line through the centers of the bases of the XII and the VI – 12:00 and 6:00 – you’ll see that they are not on the actual vertical axis of the watch at all, but are instead offset, rotated clockwise about 30º.

Zoom InCartier Crash

And then there are the Roman numerals themselves.

We are so used to instinctively and easily reading the time from a watch with a vertically and horizontally symmetrical design, that it’s easy to not notice that despite the fact that you can read the time easily from a Crash watch, it should in fact not work at all. The shapes of the numerals are wildly distorted and moreover, no numeral looks like any other; the shapes, orientations, and line width variations are unique to the Crash and are certainly not the result of using any standard font. It is a kind of magician’s trick. While the Roman numerals do seem to follow the distorted – the very profoundly distorted – shape of the case, they are in fact hiding a symmetry of their own.

Zoom InCartier Crash

If you start from the center of the dial and divide a circle into 12 equal 30º segments, you will find that the bases of each of the numerals are precisely oriented along the lines separating each segment. The distorted shapes of the numerals and cases make it seem as if there is no central radial symmetry, but it is a bit like a very successful magician’s trick – the effect is visible out there in broad daylight for all to see, and so is the sleight-of-hand, but you only see the former, not the latter.

The Cartier Crash And The Holographic Universe

One of the weirdest modern cosmological theories is that the three-dimensional bulk physical space we inhabit, is an illusion – the information necessary to encode the entire universe sits on a flat surface, not in three dimensional space (the actual argument is extremely complex mathematically but it is related to the fact that the entropy of a black hole – the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, if you want to be specific – is proportional to the area of the black hole’s event horizon, rather than the volume it encloses. This would seem to be absurd but repeated mathematical analyses have show it to be true (to paraphrase what Breguet said about resonance).

Zoom InCartier Crash

I have been looking at and writing about the Crash for many years and have never quite managed to put my finger on why it seems so irresistibly hypnotic to look at. But this time around, I’ve noticed that all the asymmetries in the design, which should interfere with each other and produce discordant visual disharmony, instead work somewhat like the interference pattern between the reference beam and the illumination beam in a hologram – you get a sense of extension into three dimensional space, just as the two dimensional surface of a black hole event horizon encodes the total information capacity of the black hole.

The Crash is a very beautiful watch, but also one which is, in a subtle way, also deeply unsettling. Its apparent simplicity of design and the canonical accidental nature of its inspiration hide the fact that it is one of the most sophisticated watch designs ever to come down the pike, and one that in my case at least, has rewarded two decades of close examination and counting. It’s our current Watch Of The Week, but it’s also one of the most thought provoking watches of all time.

All photos, Paige Thatcher, senior photographer, The 1916 Company.com.