In an age where trends flicker and fade at the speed of a scroll, designer Rebecca Rau offers something rare: permanence. Her debut collection, Then & Now, is not merely jewelry; it is a dialogue between centuries. Drawing upon genuine historical artifacts that span from 1200 BC to 1880 AD, Rau fuses antiquity and modernity into singular works of art that reframe our relationship with time, beauty and craft.
The collection made its first appearance at M.S. Rau in New Orleans, the world-renowned gallery owned by Rau’s family for generations, before traveling to New York City Jewelry Week for its East Coast debut. Within these jewels lies a quiet reverence for history, a recognition that every artifact carries a story waiting to be retold.
“I’m drawn to the tension between resilience and permanence,” Rau explained. “Then & Now bridges centuries through shared human impulses: creation, adornment and ritual. These pieces remind us that the concept of beauty is ever evolving, but handmade objects continue to possess a kind of gravitas, especially when they’ve survived hundreds of years.”
It’s easy to see that philosophy in practice. A Renaissance-inspired necklace centers on a first- to second-century cut of brown jasper, its ancient fragment now framed by the fiery glow of unheated orange zircons, umbalite garnets and a strand of Tahitian pearls, suspended from a 19th-century French chain. In another piece, a rare Gothic glass pendant radiates softly against the gleam of high-karat gold, its medieval light renewed through a contemporary paperclip chain that transforms the relic into a statement of modern grace.
Elsewhere, Rau draws upon even deeper history: a Bactrian amulet dating back to 1200 BC or a 13th-century Spanish gilt-bronze harness, once part of ceremonial armor. Rau’s sensitivity to materials is instinctive, shaped by a lifetime spent among relics of the past. As a fourth-generation antique dealer and daughter of M.S. Rau’s storied New Orleans legacy, she grew up surrounded by world-class art and artifacts. After earning a master’s degree from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London, she traveled extensively across Europe and Asia, acquiring rare jewels and objets d’art while refining her eye as both scholar and artist. With Then & Now, she merges these two worlds, the academic and the aesthetic, into something deeply personal.
Each one-of-a-kind piece in the collection carries a conversation between what was and what might be, between the craftsman of another age and the artist of today. In Rau’s hands, history is not static; it becomes intimate. Her jewels are not replicas of the past but living vessels of memory, transformed through her vision into adornments that speak to endurance, reinvention and timelessness.
