Courtesy of Sotheby’s
A London Cartier Crash sold for a record $853k last week so I wrote about it.
I’ve wanted to do a more comprehensive article about the Cartier Crash for a while. But I didn’t want it to be about all the noise surrounding the Crash. Not the big auction results; not John Goldberger taking a photo of Tyler the Creator wearing one, or Kanye tweeting a photo of one.
Sure, those things were all the impetus for writing about the Crash. Last week, Sotheby’s sold an original London Crash for $853k. It’s one of the biggest vintage Cartier results ever. But that’s not why I wanted to write about the Crash.
It’s funny, much the way the actual origin story of the Crash has been subsumed by the myth of the Crash (that designers were inspired to create the Crash by a molten Cartier Baignoire Allongée involved in a car crash), today the Crash has been similarly overshadowed by a certain myth-making.
Over on H*dinkee, I tried to tell what I feel like is the more interesting story about the Cartier Crash, the real story.
To do that, we have to head back to 1960s London, aka Swinging Sixties. Mods, miniskirts, Mick Jagger — all roamed the streets of London, shocking the city out of its post-war malaise and into the epicenter of style. “As opposed to the 1950s, which had been clouded in post-war austerity and restraint, the 1960s was a decade of rebellion with the young challenging the status quo and wanting to be different from their parents,” Francesca Cartier Brickell, author of the excellent book The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire (and granddaughter of Jean-Jacques Cartier), told me.
The intersection of history and design is endlessly fascinating to me. The last three freelance articles I’ve written have indirectly explored this intersection:
1950s: The Junghans Max Bill, the minimalist product of the Bauhaus-influenced designer. Just put the Max Bill (a product of those austere 50s), next to the Crash and you can begin to understand the revolution of the Swinging Sixties that Cartier Brickell mentions
1960s: The maximalist Cartier Crash
1990s: Marc Newson’s Ikepod explored bold, natural shapes, coming off of the excess of the 80s, just as the dot-com bubble rapidly inflated
We always say that trends come and go, and it’s true, but it’s interesting to reflect on why that’s the case. Why was the Crash created in the Swinging Sixties in London? Why has it had a certain rebirth over the past couple of years? What’s similar about our current time and the 1960s in London?
💩 Read the full article on H*dinkee here.
p.s. don’t go to the H*dinkee comments for any insightful convos about hip-hop.