For those of you who thought the Olympics was a global sporting competition with its roots in ancient Greece—you are mostly correct. There’s also, of course, an element of requisite peacocking—great band name, btw—in the form of the Prelude to the Olympics, a star-studded event held this week at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in which every well-dressed celebrity and their mother made an appearance. Chief among said stars was none other than LeBron James rocking one of the world’s most coveted watches: a Cartier Crash.
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Maybe you’re tired of hearing about the Cartier Crash already—it doesn’t matter. This melty piece of haute horlogerie, as familiar as it may have become in its dizzying rise to the top of horological circles, is still the grail piece for countless watch nerds out there. And for good reason: Its curvaceous silhouette is anything but standard fare. Plus, the Parisian maison makes so few of them that simply saving up enough scratch to scratch the Crash itch is a financial coup worthy of at least a pat on the head from the ghost of Charlie Munger.
We probably don’t need to recount this ludicrously desirable model’s history to you in full—but in brief: Cartier London accepted the challenge to design an unconventional watch by “pinching the ends at a point and pulling a kink in the middle.” After much trial and error, the Crash debuted in 1967 and sold for the equivalent of $9,000 or so today. (Writer clutches his proverbial pearls and swoons.) Not many were produced owing to the difficult, largely handmade manufacturing process, and Cartier’s business was eventually sold outside the family. But the model continued to be produced in the ’80s and ’90s; by the 2010s, collectors were going gaga for them, willing to pay multiple-six-figures to get in on the action. By 2024, watch editors were confident we had seen “Peak Crash.”
But at some point, LeBron James paid a lot of money—roughly $55,000 at retail, maybe $250,000 today—for a Crash in pink gold driven by a skeletonized, hand-wound, two-hand 9618 MC movement. Limited to 67 pieces, it was one of the “It” watches in 2016—the year it was released—and given its highly limited nature and admittedly wild movement, it remains furiously desirable today. And let’s be real: If you bought into the hype and dropped a BMW Z4’s worth of cash on a Crash, would you be willing to set it aside just because a bunch of “watch people” are sick of seeing them on Instagram?
We didn’t think so. I’m tellin’ ya—we haven’t seen the last of this Tom Brady-approved, Tyler the Creator-co-signed, Kanye West-worn slice of zeitgeist. We in the watch world may have seen our fill of it, but the larger world—the actual world—clearly has not. More to the point: James’s skeletonized Crash is, in this writer’s humble opinion, one of his best watches. Why not wear the hell out of it?
