As the saying goes, behind every successful man, there is a woman. In Reuven Kassai’s case, the woman is his ex-wife, and she’s the reason he got involved with jewelry.
“Her father was a diamond broker,” says Kassai. “I went into the business and learned diamond cutting. I was buying, polishing and selling fancy-colored diamonds. Then I got divorced.”
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Their separation allowed him to chart his own career. Kassai thus started buying, melting and selling antique silver. “But I found that a lot of the pieces had signs of the artist in them,” says Kassai, whose parents own a silver shop in Manhattan, “and it was a pity for me to melt them.”
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Eventually, Kassai turned his sights back to jewelry, using the scraps of silver he already had collected. The first ring he designed featured silver wire repurposed from an antique dish. “I used the band running around the perimeter of the dish,” he recalls. The ring, he notes, “didn’t come out right. But I thought, Wow, this kind of looks like the letter A. Let me make a B….” He went on to make the rest of the alphabet, creating his first line of silver pendants.
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R U Vain, a play on his first name, Reuven, now boasts everything from cuff links and dog tags to diamond-encrusted bangles and those letter pendants — all hammered and artfully rough hewn. “I love textures in silver,” the designer says of the organic vibe behind his collection, which retails from $130 to $3,000 and is available at Maxandchloe.com.
“When it’s polished and straight, you don’t get to see the true life of the metal,” he says.