The former star quarterback represents a tipping point for an oversaturated Cartier Crash scene, but the worse news is that the watch was flawed to begin with.
The Cariter Crash may be a current favorite among many watch enthusiasts, but closer investigation reveals that the twisted watch is emblematic of Cartier’s lowest moment. The struggling jewelry house created the Crash during the late 1960s as a failed late-game hail-Mary pass to London’s hipsters. I still can’t believe Mike Meyers didn’t wear a Cartier Crash while playing the James Bond-spoof Austin Powers. “Yeaaaah baby, look how weird and squiggly my watch is, baby! Yeaaaaah.” Alas, the Crash was an ill-received defilement of the studied elegance that set nearly all other Cartier watches among the most revered and timeless horological designs.
As if the Crash weren’t already a failure in and of itself, the watch’s rarity and shock-value have driven the watch to the top of the must-be-seen-wearing-it list collectively maintained by red-carpet watch collectors. In April of this year, Tom Brady—arguably the greatest quarterback ever to play in the NFL, but certainly not the world’s hippest dude—sourced himself a platinum Crash, making the obscenely overpriced and already over-worn odd-ball from Cartier decidedly uncool.
In 2019, Sports Illustrated named Brady as among the most stylish athletes, but there was a hidden dig at Brady’s fashion sense in SI’s commentary: “When it comes to…his sense of style, Tom Brady has come a long way. [He] keeps getting better with age and experience, nailing sophisticated suits and subtle casual looks.” Saying someone has “come a long way” or that they’re “getting better” is always an underhanded criticism—the implication being that there was (and may still be) room for improvement. However slyly, Sports Illustrated correctly points to the fact that Tom Brady didn’t emerge from a fashion-conscious milieu with fully formed great taste.
Brady may have it sorted out fashion wise by sticking to the basics, which the Cartier Crash is not.Getty
I think it’s fair to say that American football isn’t exactly a nurturing environment for a man’s feminine side, which—I believe—is pretty much mandatory for the development of world-class fashion sensibilities. I was raised in Buffalo, N.Y.—a post-industrial city where American football has for decades held the status of a legitimate religion—and I can say with some experiential authority that, no matter how democratically widespread luxury brands and fashionable duds are these days, American football culture has yet to churn out effete aesthetes.
In other words, it’s best when the serious jocks stick to the basics, and I would agree that Brady does well with suits and subtle casual looks—just as the ever-sharp Mohammad Ali did before him, for example. But venturing into more daring fashion moves, like rocking the hyped-up Cartier Crash, may not be wise for a serious jock any more than it would be wise for a hypebeast (or fashionista, in my generation’s lingo) to step onto the football field or into the boxing ring. In any of those scenarios, you’re going to get knocked down. And when Brady rocked his Crash in April, the horological intelligentsia sacked the quarterback from all sides.
Last month, GQ published an article titled, “Have We Reached Peak Cartier Crash?,” citing watch expert Ben Clymer of Hodinkee as writing “the Crash is now pedestrian,” and horological influencer Brynn Wallner posting on Instagram, “Ok I love it but the Cartier Crash needs a breather.” In our own office here at Robb Report, there was a collective rolling of the eyes when Brady appeared in his Cartier Crash, with one colleague commenting that it reminded him of “those kids in college who hung posters of Dali’s melting clocks on the wall to appear smarter and more cool than they actually were.”
The Crash was a gimmick, and no one wanted it. Only 12 were sold during the original production run.Cartier
All this criticism brings us to the crux of my inquiry: Why, exactly, did Tom Brady wearing the Cartier Crash rub so many people in the watch space the wrong way?
The easy answer, to put it bluntly, is that no matter how far his wardrobe has come, Brady will always be emblematic of mainstream America. Anyone who likes to think of themselves as being within 10 yards of current fashion’s bleeding edge will not oblige the notion of possessing even remotely pedestrian taste—let alone American taste, and most certainly not American jock taste. So, if America’s hunk of a quarterback moves into the Crash zone, then we taste-makers, influences and high-minded watch collectors will exit with our noses upturned at the stench of low-brow culture. However stuck in high school-think all this may be, American football culture and of that of urban coastal fashion elites remain at opposite ends of the playing field. And if anyone represents the other team for us life-long aesthetes, it’s Tom Brady.
That’s the easy answer as to why Tom Brady apparently wrecked the Cartier Crash. But I think the problems here run deeper. We need to consider the history of Cartier’s aesthetic codes, as well as the nature of luxury branding dynamics, to understand the cultural dynamics at play here.
As for the luxury branding piece, Cartier (along with Tiffany, Halston, and others) has long struggled to maintain its appearance as a true luxury brand. As luxury market experts J. N. Kapferer and V. Bastien write in their seminal work The Luxury Strategy, “It’s important…not to fall either into a mechanical conception of luxury, made up of very high prices and Hollywood celebrities, or into an excessively traditional and historical acceptance of luxury.” This is the dynamic Cartier must navigate as a brand, and it is the same dynamic from which tastemakers—however unknowingly—derive much of their opinions of luxury brands. Clearly the tastemakers have yelled out, “That’s too much celebrity nonsense for Cartier!”
The Cartier Tank Normale (L) and Tank Louis (R) are timelessly elegant.Cartier
When digging into the history of the Crash itself, however, it becomes clearer why Brady wearing this specific watch was so controversial. None of this hoopla would have happened if Brady had worn a Cartier Tank, which isn’t an expression machismo by any measure. (The very feminine Rudolph Valentino and Andy Warhol regularly wore Tanks, for example.) A Cartier Tank would have slipped under the radar (not to mention the cuff) of Brady’s suddenly-excellent-yet-safely-pedestrian suits and sweaters. Unlike the Tank, the Crash is an attention-grabbing watch. It’s the opposite of the quiet elegance that has defined Cartier wristwatches since the first decade of the 20th century. The Crash wrecks Cartier’s codes of elegance.
Looking back much later at the Crash, Jean-Jacques Cartier told his granddaughter Francesca Cartier Brickell that, “We should have charged more. Especially given how long each one took, tying up the workshop for an extended period. But you simply couldn’t charge too much then. There wasn’t that much wealth around. When I see what they go for today, oh my!”
Cartier’s now-famous Crash watch was not only an anomalous concession to off-brand aesthetics, but the Crash also failed miserably as a commercial product. By all standards, the Cartier Crash was wrecked from the get-go. Seen in this historical context, the Crash is perhaps even a little pathetic.
Cartier Crash, Lot 63 at Phillips’s Geneva Watch Auction in 2020, sold for over a $250,000.Courtesy of Phillips
If, for a moment, we ignore Tom Brady and all the other folks rocking a Cartier Crash on the world’s red carpets, the Crash remains a defilement of the studied elegance that Cartier watches had sustained for so many decades, right up into the 1960s. The Cartier Tank is a masterpiece of elegance and simplicity. Louis Cartier had worked for years in his Paris atelier to solve the problem of attaching a strap to a wristwatch in a manner that met his uniquely high standards. Except for the Crash, almost every other Cartier watch up to that point had been timeless, elegant, refined, balanced and understated.
It is these qualities that we turn to Cartier for. Not for hype, or concessions to passing fads, or attention-grabbing gimmicks. Cartier should never have smashed its proverbial guitar, and those who reach for the Crash are reaching for a failed gimmick. Perhaps the lesson here comes from Tom Brady’s own wardrobe: unless you really know what you’re doing, stick to the classics.