The Museum in Your Pocket: Lockets as Modern Cabinets of Curiosity

There was a time when wonder was collected in drawers.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, before the age of museums, there were Wunderkammern — rooms, boxes, or ornate cabinets that held the marvelous and the inexplicable: fossilized bones next to crystal spheres, a mummified hummingbird beside a carved ivory tooth. These were cabinets of curiosity, spaces not for categorization but for wonder. They were portals into the cherished and unknowable.

In many ways, a locket is the modern inheritor of this tradition. Not merely a piece of jewelry, but a miniature gallery of the soul.

Personal Curation, Pocket-Sized

 

Unlike a museum, which preserves what the world has agreed is valuable, a locket is personal mythology. It holds what you deem sacred—a lock of hair, a photograph, a note lovingly folded.

Just as cabinets of curiosity once curated constellations of meaning, Monica Rich Kosann's lockets become vessels of self-curation. What you choose to place inside (an old concert stub, a pressed wildflower, a lover’s initials in graphite) speaks to your internal world, your private collection of the extraordinary.

Each piece is a paradox: both deeply intimate and defiantly decorative. A public face. A hidden story.

From Museums to Your Memory

 

Stand in front of a painting at a museum, and you may wonder why it feels familiar. It’s because you, too, are composing still lifes every day. In a drawer. On a dresser. Inside a locket.

The impulse to preserve beauty against time’s erosion is ancient and universal. And perhaps this is the secret of the locket: it makes memory wearable. Portable. Protected.

The gold becomes a reliquary. The hinge, a ritual. The act of opening, a tiny resurrection.

Curate Your Cabinet

 

We invite you to see your jewelry not just as an accessory, but as a museum; a curated microcosm of your life. Ask yourself:

1. If you had only two inches of space, what would you choose to preserve?

2. What small artifact would make your descendants pause, smile, wonder?

3. What does your personal cabinet of curiosity contain?

Start there. Begin collecting.

Because wonder has always belonged in small spaces.