Shortly before his death in 2010, Jean-Jacques Cartier decided to reveal a secret that he’d held for close to five decades. Speaking to his granddaughter, Francesca Cartier Brickell, the man who had been the last family member to be directly involved in the business prior to its sale in 1964, finally decided to shatter a few myths surrounding his most eulogised timepiece: the Cartier Crash.

At 91 years old, Jean-Jacques had never publicly spoken about the origins of one of the strangest, most iconoclastic watches ever produced. When the Cartier ‘Crash’ first appeared in the brand’s London store in 1967, journalists and rival horologists competed to decry what looked to many like a watch that had been run over by a truck.

“Grandpa would spend every lunch hour not meeting clients,” Francesca told the New York Times in a 2024 interview timed to coincide with the release of her biography of Cartier, “but wandering over the road to Sotheby’s or Christie’s to walk around beautiful pieces of art.”

English actor Stewart Granger, who commissioned the first Cartier Crash, on set in Rome in 1966. Image: Alamy

Granger wearing a Cartier Santos watch in 1952. Image: Alamy

“He wasn’t a salesman; he was an introverted artist,” she continued, before playing the taped interview she had made with her grandfather. “Imagine an oval,” Jean-Jacques says in the recording, “…and then pinch it into a point, and put a kink in the middle.”

The tape’s contents obliterate one of the most venerable myths of the Crash. Considered for decades to be a watch directly influenced by the dripping, melting clocks depicted in Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, the truth was that Cartier, along with his chief design partner, Rupert Emmerson, created it, as Jean-Jacques recalls, “just like that” – with no reference to Dali, or Surrealism.

The Crash, along with a panoply of jewels, gemstones and drawings, will be displayed at a Cartier exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum from April until November. The scotching of the Dali association by Jean-Jacques’s granddaughter has done nothing to diminish the essence of the watch; its semi-dissolved dial and askew Roman numerals remain jarring, subversive, and Coutts Silk card-scorchingly expensive to buy (if you can find one).

The Crash’s insubordinate credentials burnish even brighter when placed in context alongside the conservative classicism of Cartier’s mainstream watch styles of the 1960s. The Crash arrived at a time when London, or at least Chelsea and the West End, was morphing from a city mired in fedoras and fogeyism to one luxuriating in long hair, short skirts and a desire to throw off the drizzly gloom of post-war austerity.

The leading neophytes of the London scene wanted clothes, haircuts, music and watches that would revolt and confuse their parents in equal measure. All of which might help background the design thinking behind Cartier’s new watch, and possibly the intentions of the man who commissioned it.

Michael Caine and Terence Stamp would have had little in common with fellow actor Stewart Granger, a leading man in his own right, but a man already in his 50s and, best known for hoary old swashbucklers like King Solomon’s Mines and The Last Safari, hardly someone who could be described as a bright young thing. Yet Granger desired a wristwatch that was significantly more contemporary-looking than his most famous films, asking Cartier to create something “unlike any other.”

Jean-Jacques and Rupert Emmerson decided to use the custom commission to experiment. They took the extant Maxi Oval design and made some radical alterations, transforming it, in the minds of some, to what looked like horological roadkill. Originally, Emmerson even wanted the Crash to have a cracked dial. This idea was vetoed by Jean-Jacques who felt the rended look shouldn’t be taken quite so far. Making the template would prove to be a burdensome challenge for Eric Denton, the head watchmaker at Cartier London and the man responsible for combining design with internal mechanics.

“You see, it’s all very well coming up with a good-looking design,” says Jean-Jacques on the tape, “but it had to tell the time too. And because the dial was irregular, the numbers weren’t at the standard places.”

Ensuring the numerals on the squashed dial remained at the right places to tell the time proved to be near impossible for Denton and his team. The Crash looked unique, but it failed in the most fundamental way possible.

It took numerous deconstructions, dial extractions and re-paintings before a model was ready to present to Granger, who took it home, decided he didn’t like it, and promptly brought it back to Cartier, claiming he didn’t want a watch that was so sui generis after all.

It’s not hard to see why the celluloid lothario didn’t view the Crash as his sartorial saviour when it came to blending in with the hip young things of '60s London. While Patek Philippe was making slightly asymmetric watches for men, Cartier had opted to deliquesce shape entirely with its tyro design. Granger simply didn’t get it. Chastened by the return-to-sender, Jean-Jacques only manufactured around a dozen more Crash watches between 1967 and ’68.

“We should have charged more. Especially given how long each one took, tying up the workshop for an extended period,” rued Jean-Jacques to his granddaughter. “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!”

Jay-Z at the London premiere of The Harder They Fall, 2021. Image: Alamy

Tom Brady at the Laureus World Sports Awards, Madrid, 2024

From an original price of around £800 (approx. £7,500 in today’s money), a 1968 Crash sold at auction in 2014 for just over £100,000. Yet it wasn’t so much the popularity of vintage Crashes at auction that prompted the slow ascendency of the watch to its present, totemic status, but the types of people who have recently revealed themselves as fans. To wit: Timothée Chalamet, Jay-Z and Tyler, The Creator, and American footballer Tom Brady, among others.

Spend any given time on Crash-focused Reddit pages or Cartier-associated areas of social media, and you’ll know that the current A-list popularity of the jeweller’s most avant-garde watch has prompted something of a backlash. To some Cartier cognoscenti, it seems that seeing the likes of Brady wearing a Crash, in his case a platinum edition from 2023, is the horological equivalent of spotting James Corden on stage at the Harold Pinter theatre. In short, how dare you?

Elitism? Celebrity endorsement? Spiralling financial value? The late Jean-Jacques Cartier could surely not have wanted for more.

Cartier is on at V&A South Kensington from 12 April - 16 November 2025, vam.ac.uk

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