Jaeger-LeCoultre presents the exclusive Adventure Spirit Travelling Collection in the London Flagship Boutique, Old Bond Street and invites visitors to discover the world of watchmaking and iconic timepieces.
The story began with the military watches of the 1940s, before transitioning to the legendary diving watches of the 1960s. This was followed by a bold move to the big and colourful sports watches of the 1970s, and a series of highly technical conceptual watches in the 2000s. Jaeger-LeCoultre celebrates its great heritage by tracing the evolution of La Grande Maison’s sport watches through the ages, and the origins of its contemporary Polaris collection.
Celebrating a genre of watches distinguished by their purposeful functionality and distinctive style, the story of the sports watches at Jaeger-LeCoultre told in four chapters, each defined by a period of significant cultural and social change, as well as by horological advances.
Military Watches revisits the early days of aviation, when a precise wristwatch had been an essential cockpit instrument, vital to a pilot’s survival. Jaeger-LeCoultre produced specialized watches that were robust, mechanically precise and highly legible as demanded by its military clients, including the (British) Royal Air Force and Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm.
Diving Watches explores the first specialised underwater watches. Jaeger-LeCoultre developed its first diving watch, the Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox Deep Sea with a unique attribute – an alarm that would vibrate and sound an aural warning when it was time to return to the surface.
Bold Sports Watches showcases the exuberance and stylistic disruption of the 1970s, expressed in all fields of design: interiors, clothing, cars and watches. It was a period of great creativity at Jaeger-LeCoultre: its sports watches retained all of the features that made them sports watches but the Maison rewrote the classical aesthetic codes, with new forms and display styles, and bold use of colour.
High Concept Sports Watches returns to the millennium, a period marked by a creative frenzy in many fields, marrying technology and design – a direction also embraced by Jaeger-LeCoultre with a new genre of high-performance concept watches, the Master Compressor line.
As a tribute to Jaeger-LeCoultre’s most remarkable sport timepieces, La Grande Maison has assembled a selection of rare models in the Travelling Collection, showcasing the versatility and unique elegance of sports watches over the past eight decades. The collection includes true masterpieces of watchmaking, such as the Geophysic, renowned for its notable accuracy, resistance, and reliability.
Among the highlights of this collection are pioneering timepieces that reflect Jaeger-LeCoultre’s spirit of innovation and adventure. One such piece (the Geophysic) was presented to the commander of the Nautilus, the first atomic submarine to reach the North Pole in August 1958. The Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox Deep Sea was the world’s first diving watch equipped with an alarm, providing both a high-frequency acoustic signal and a tactile vibration to indicate elapsed time underwater. More recent models, such as the Master Compressor Extreme LAB 2 – comprising 569 components – incorporate advanced technical features, including a GMT function and a power reserve indicator.
By shining a spotlight on sports watches, The Adventure Spirit celebrates the inventiveness of the Watchmaker of Watchmakers™ through its ongoing evolution and reinvention of a genre defined by high performance, robustness, and practical functions, all enhanced by distinctive aesthetics. The Maison’s latest models carry forward this sporty legacy, reinterpreting it for today’s lifestyles and projecting it into the future.
Throughout the Adventure Spirit Travelling Collection, Jaeger-LeCoultre invites guests to embark on a curated journey through horological excellence. The Flagship Boutique in Old Bond Street will showcase significant and historical timepieces from each dedicated chapter along with the Polaris collection, from past to present, offering an immersive experience and celebrating the intrepid spirit that has always driven the Manufacture.
The Adventure Spirit Travelling Collection will be on display from 15 September – 18 October 2025 at the Jaeger-LeCoultre Flagship Boutique, 13 Old Bond St, London W1S 4SX and will be open to the public from Monday to Saturday from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.