We all have our moments that give us the ick. For Wallner, it was one of Nouveau’s recent videos that features an NSO—”New Special Order”—Crash that “really pulled the veil from my eyes,” she said. It wasn’t that the Crash was unattractive, but that whoever originally commissioned it so blithely flipped it to the man in Nouveau’s video. “It just made me feel that the watch is becoming increasingly more sellable—read: disposable,” Wallner said. Wind, unprompted, brought up the same video. “There’s an NSO Crash seemingly coming out every two seconds,” he said.
Nouveau pushed back on the idea that the Crash is as pervasive as it appears on the internet. “There are none on the market that I can offer to anybody,” he said. When my logical brain kicks in, I understand this is still a very rare watch—one that most people are still learning about. Wallner writes that she still gets comments from her followers who aren’t familiar with the Crash. “As watch heads, we’re still very much in a bubble,” she added. “Something may seem ‘played out’ to us, but when we step outside of this niche, we realize that most people are still in the ecstatic discovery phase.”
The folks buying it aren’t burning out on the Crash either. “The market has gone back up from where it was last year, but still less than peak from a couple years ago,” Adam Golden, the founder of Menta Watches, told me. “I think it’s settled where it’s at.” The data supports Golden’s assertion. Revolution recently put together a comprehensive view of the Crash’s sales at auction and found that while it’s dipped slightly from its peak, prices are still way up from 2018.
Feelings of Crash overexposure largely come from the idea that the wrong people are wearing them. Stan and Brady, for example, don’t seem to match the piece’s vibe. “They’re not known for dressing wacky,” Nouveau said. “This is a fairly wacky watch.” I’d rather see collectors progress like Tyler, the Creator. He started with the Crash and worked his way to Cartier’s other interesting shapes, like the Pebble, Obus, and Duoplan. But when talking to clients interested in the Crash, Nouveau doesn’t find this type of passion in the brand. “In my experience, I haven’t seen someone be like, ‘I want a Crash. No Crash? Okay, I’ll try this,’” he said. “I don’t think a lot of these people care about Cartier.”
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