A brand new range of stainless steel sports and travel-oriented watches brings back the Polaris name and aims to revitalise Jaeger-LeCoultre’s fortunes

By Chris Hall

For some months now, we have been hearing that Jaeger-LeCoultre would be releasing a new collection of watches, one that would go some way to open the brand up to a younger audience and counter what we can only assume are underwhelming sales figures. Now, here it is. 
It’s called the Polaris collection, and if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because the name is not a new one for the brand. It originally adorned a line of Memovox alarm watches in the 1960s, badged either as Jaeger-LeCoultre or LeCoultre, for the US market – and has been revived once before already, when Jaeger-LeCoultre released a limited edition 768-piece run of a Polaris Memovox tribute in 2008. Ten years later, Polaris is back, and this time it covers more than alarms.  The original Polaris, a diver’s Memovox from the early 1960s
The foundation of the collection is the Polaris Automatic, a three-hander in stainless steel currently being shown only with a blue dial – we would assume at the very least a black dial version also exists. It has an inner rotating dive bezel and supercompressor-style twin crowns, one at 2 o’clock and the other at 4 o’clock.
Design wise, the dial is very faithful to Polaris pieces of yore, with applied indexes and numerals filled with a faux-aged tone of S...