Beautifully Rare and Unique Cartier Watches Going Up for Auction

The Cartier Crash Was Never an Accident

The story has circulated for decades: a Cartier watch melted in a car fire, the warped case retrieved and reimagined as something new. A romantic origin myth. The truth is stranger.

Jean-Jacques Cartier and designer Rupert Emmerson bent and pinched the Maxi Oval deliberately, coaxing one of watchmaking’s most radical case shapes into existence through pure intention. The accident was the point.

A 1987 London Crash in yellow gold is now the centerpiece of an upcoming Sotheby’s auction, and it may be the rarest object in the room. Only three are believed to have been made that year.

It leads a collection of more than 300 vintage Cartier timepieces assembled over 25 years by a single anonymous collector, a body of work that reads less like an accumulation and more like a sustained argument about what design can be.

The Santos. The Tank. The Baignoire.

The Pebble, the Decagonal, the Asymetrique, the Driver. Every landmark silhouette the maison produced across its Paris, New York, and London workshops, with particular depth in what came out of the London atelier between 1967 and 1974, a period when Cartier was making things that looked like nothing else on earth.

The collection is expected to surpass $15 million. That number is almost beside the point. What’s being auctioned is a record of a design philosophy that treated the wristwatch not as a solved problem but as an open question.

See more about the coming auction on Sotheby’s website.