Written by Hunter Ramos
Art by Lily Anderson
When I leave my apartment, there are only four items I take with me, no matter where I am going: my phone, headphones, keys, and wallet. My wallet is a brown leather bifold with a custom-made Cthulhu engraving, designed by my wife, Yana. Cthulhu being a cosmic horror created by H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s, a decade where nothing really happened, like the 2020s’. Wallets are like phones or villain origin stories; everyone has one. Wallets exist in that cozy space on the Venn diagram where ‘utility’ meets ‘accessory.’ People’s self-identification with their wallets ranges from ‘emotional security’ to mere function. But for all the ways that our wallets are different, they tend to share a few characteristics. We expect that wallets will hold cash, some cards, an ID, silver coins stamped with Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus’s face, some moldy dried fruit, and a dozen nuts. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Hunter, my silver coins are stamped with Marcus Ulpius Traianus, and I prefer seeds and boiled legumes in my wallet.” And look, some people have two IDs, one for the waiter and one for the drive home later. To each, our own.
For those of you who are surprised to hear about food in wallets, join the party! My first encounter with this information was to roll my eyes at the obvious AI hallucination, which of course hardened into disgust as I discovered that it was, in fact, true. And this is a good place to explore the origin of the wallet, both the word and the concept.
From a concept standpoint, the history of the wallet is the history of portable vessel for my day-to-day comfort or necessity items. Where this becomes upsetting is that in the ancient and medieval world, a vessel for coin was good as a vessel for snacks, and mixing them was apparently not uncommon (1).
From an etymological standpoint, the modern term for wallet probably traces its origin back to French or Old-French in the late 14th century (2). To put that into perspective, this was the same century that saw Europe and Asia decimated by the Black Death, and England invent America’s Spirit Dish, apple pie. This version of wallet was understood to be a “bag, knapsack, or large purse,” meaning that, if we string together these various separate truths, there is a non-zero chance that a peasant in late medieval England was gorging on palmfuls of apple pie out of her wallet while a flare-up of the bubonic plague ravaged her village, which was not dissimilar to how I experienced the COVID-19 pandemic (2).
For a moment in time, between the 14th century and the later evolution of wallets as almost exclusively vessels for cash and IDs, wallets also blossomed into housing for other niche personal items, like smoking accessories (3). In 19th-century Spain, wallets were a popular container for flint and steel, to easily light cigarettes, which, fortunately, would not cause cancer until 1964.
This brings us closer to the ubiquitous wallets of today, which have evolved to accommodate our latest versions of imaginary value—cash and cards. Multiple types of paper money had existed and circulated in China for about a thousand years when Massachusetts invented paper money in 1690 (4,5). Don’t worry, they would not overprint and hyperinflate that currency to the point of losing most of its value, and then subsequently reintroduce a new edition of paper money and repeat the same mistake four more times, because that would be silly. Paper money being printed and accepted as tax dues enabled the bi-fold, tri-fold, and zipper wallets of today. Which, thankfully for my sanity, makes for poor food storage devices.
This brings us, in very broad strokes, to our current wallet environment. The wallets of today are designed to help us hold the following: cash so we can spend, cards so we can spend and accrue debt at the same time, IDs to prove that we are old enough to drink (the two ID trick gets around this), and proving we are allowed to drive. And no, there is not yet a card for drinking and driving at the same time, sorry, Mr. Timberlake.
In that way, wallets represent how various pressures manifest themselves as what we take into the world. The wallet contains my access to goods and services in our consumption-focused state, while also proving to the authorities that I might have a right to exist in public or behind a wheel. Wallets also house membership cards, insurance cards, or public transportation passes, to name a few.
Sure, I could function without the wallet; I would simply shove all of those things in my pocket. But the wallet is a convenient way to access convenience. Wallets, like most of the material things we choose from the catalog of personal expression, offer insights into us. My wallet represents my style and my pop-culture preference. I am not like other boys with their punisher skull wallet; mine is the visage of an eldritch horror beyond my comprehension, which looks a lot like an octopus thingy. Sorry Lovecraft, I can very much comprehend an octopus monster. My wallet contains little cash, because when I have cash, it almost always slips through my fingers, and as few cards as possible.
Even a simple functional wallet can be a commentary on oneself. For what felt like my entire childhood, my father had the same black trifold wallet with a velcro seal that was one more card away from popping a stitch. This is a contrast of the wallet itself being visually minimalistic, but the upper limits of its capacity being maximalistic.
I would accuse my dad’s wallet of being the canary in the coal mine of design death. As cash is falling out of style, and many men are rapidly fleeing from having a personality or enjoying self-expression, wallets are adapting yet again. Founded in 2013 and funded on Kickstarter, Ridge was one of the early pioneers of male minimalism. Thanks to the soulless ghouls at Ridge drawing a red subtraction symbol next to a wallet on a whiteboard, a wave of minimalism masked as maximalism is crashing against the flood walls of culture. Ridge explained their motivations, “Wallets for too long were designed to hold everything; receipts, gift cards, and anything else you can stuff in there. We turned that on its head with our minimalist first approach to design,” (6). Oh yeah? You mean the thing that your target audience could have done from the beginning: remove the unneeded wallet clutter? I hate you.
Back in my day, wallets meant something, dammit. People took pride in their wallets and in stealing a quality wallet. When I was 14, I found a handmade duct tape wallet in my neighborhood. It was devoid of identification or cards, but it had one of the most precious things a teenager can find: cash. This cash came in handy when I added another stamp to the boba tea loyalty card found in the front sleeve. I had not the frontal lobe development to appreciate a good handmade wallet, so… into the trash it went. When one of my neighbors, who was also a classmate, knocked on my door a few days later and asked if I had seen their wallet, and by the way it is made from duct tape, I shook my head and wished them luck in their search. Months later, he was selling homemade duct tape wallets in class, and I bought five. What would this story look like today? The shrinking of wallets and exodus of cash means I would have found a pile of magnets and useless cards. I would have never learned the lesson of possession being nine-tenths of the law, and I would not have enjoyed the best kind of boba tea: free to me.
The shrinking of wallets can be seen as a legacy of gendered expectations around the evolution of carrying vessels. Wallets, purses, and bags may share a common conceptual and etymological origin. We need to carry things with us when we leave our homes. For women, wallets are often a subcomponent of everyday carry, i.e., a knapsack in a knapsack. For men, a wallet is often the only knapsack. There are many consequences to this trend. Women are expected to bear the burden of being prepared for the realities of existence, up to and including a wallet. Women’s clothes are often designed with this assumption in mind; sorry, ladies, those pockets are cosmetic only. Conversely, the patriarchy encourages men to arrive with only a picture of themselves and some way to consume. Too much more, like a fanny pack, and the gender norm enforcement brigade shows up.
A further shrinking of wallets, especially one that does not jump the gender gap, only reinforces the social expectation that women be prepared while men simply show up. Men need little more than a strap and two magnets, and women need to have basically all of the things.
For men and women, and everything between and beyond, wallets are probably not going anywhere anytime soon. Cops have too much fun making us pull cards out of them, pickpockets have too much fun scoring big, and wallets are too valuable as a rom-com trope to slide into obsolescence. We’ve already lost so much to the digital world, i.e., the cultural pastime of carrying loose paper around so that we can bump into our soul mate and pick the scattered sheets up together; can we really afford to lose more meet-cutes with the abolishment of the wallet?
Works Cited
(1), Campbell, A. Y. “The Boy, the Grapes, and the Foxes.” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 2, 1931, pp. 90–102. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.cobalt.champlain.edu/stable/637006. Accessed 2 Apr. 2026.
(2), “Etymonline.” Etymonline, 2025, http://www.etymonline.com/word/wallet. Accessed 2 Apr. 2026.
(3), Cushing, Caroline W. “Letter XIV.” My Library My History Letters, Descriptive of Public Monuments, Scenery and Manners in Frances and Spain, vol. 1, Oxford University, 1832, pp. 177–178. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=Jwg_AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA169#v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed 2 Apr. 2026.
(4), Szczepanski, Kallie. “The Invention of Paper Money.” ThoughtCo, 30 Apr. 2025, http://www.thoughtco.com/the-invention-of-paper-money-195167.
(5), Pressly, William L. “ America’s Paper Money: A Canvas for an Emerging Nation.” America’s Paper Money: A Canvas for an Emerging Nation | Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, Smithsonian Scholarly Press, 20 Dec. 2023, scholarlypress.si.edu/store/all/americas-paper-money-a-canvas-for-an-emerging-nation/.
(6), “About Us – the Ridge.” Ridge, ridge.com/pages/about. Accessed 2 Apr. 2026.