Worn & Wound
How a Summer Job While Pursuing a Degree in Anthropology Turned into a Decade-Long Career as Heritage Director at Zenith
Laurence Bodenmann has served as the Heritage Director of Zenith for a decade. She’s also a member of the scientific committee for The Watch Library, a non-profit public interest foundation established in 2021 to document, preserve, and share watchmaking archives. While Bodenmann has become a staple of the industry, her role in watches was mere happenstance or rather came out of necessity. It spurred from a summer job at the International Museum of Horology in La Chaux-de-Fonds while trying to earn some extra money during her pursuit of a degree in anthropology. “I was always interested in logic – when I was young, I first thought I wanted to be a math teacher,” she recalls. “But as I got older, I realized what interested me most was how different people approached reasoning,” Bodenmann continues, “and how factors like cultural context and economical or sociological diversity informed their thought process. I found it fascinating to observe how one person would approach an object or problem in one way and another person would do it completely differently.” While Bodenmann didn’t initially expect to find herself in the world of horology, we can see why it’s been such a natural fit. The entire watch industry revolves around her astute observations as a teenager. Every person within a manufacturer – from the watchmaker sitting at a bench to the executives running the brand – is faced with the same object – a timepiece – and many of the same probl...
