Wallet plays a vital role in our everyday lives. It is a compact leather or fabric case that you slide in your pocket or bag to carry along some cash, cards, bills, and other important ID documents. From carrying your daily essentials to making a lifestyle or fashion statement, a wallet gets us through our days and tells the world how we roll.

Wallets have a rich history

From the beginning of time, people have needed a way to carry around their necessary day-to-day stuff. Before the introduction of paper money, coin purses -drawstring leather pouches were used to meet this need for most folks.

Around the 1300s, the coin purse took a sharp turn away from this fanny pack road, and a more prestigious accessory, a wallet, was born. No longer did they store trinkets and food, but they instead held calling cards and coins. In 1400, wallets were modified once again as explorers like Marco Polo returned from the East, bringing along the concept of paper currency. 

The first wallets were made of horse or cow leather and included a small pouch for ID cards.

Wallets and Paper Currency

In 1609, Shakespeare himself mentioned a wallet in his play, Troilus and Cressida: “Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, wherein he puts alms of oblivion, a great-sized monster of ingratitude.” Significantly, the tireless creator and proliferator of new words, Shakespeare’s use of the word wallet was undoubtedly an indication that it would remain a mainstay of the English language.

Paper money didn’t make it to the New World until 1690, but new forms of money – and therefore new forms of wallets were thriving in Europe. Interestingly, it remained “uncivilized” to carry a wallet around in one’s pocket for the next two centuries. 

                                                            1800s wallet

Wallets were carried attached to belts and outwardly shown off “the bigger the man, the bigger the wallet,” of course. Ironically, the very rich didn’t use their wallets for money (they had someone else to worry about that) but for their smoking supplies.

The Modern Wallet

In the roaring 1920s, the flat case wallet was invented; the middle-class folks were competing to show how much money they had on hand by displaying these thickly packed wallets on their belts. Despite the status or country of origin, no man would put his wallet in a pocket, because at the time, pockets were considered feminine.

A few decades later, the standard wallet design arrived on the scene. The 1950s brought a lot to the history and evolution of wallets regarding both materials and design. A versatility of colors and exotic leathers added to the fashion side of the design equation, and the introduction of different cards, including the Diner Club for eating, the Air Travel Card for flying, paved the way to the evolution of wallets functional requirements. 

They needed multiple slots to sort numerous cards and the pieces of identification one required to use them. From the clutch to the b i-fold wallet, all manner of modern design updates led to the peak of “fashion wallet” during this decade. Moving into the 2000s and beyond, wallets became an indispensable accessory for every individual. With the onset of credit and debit cards, traditional bulky bi-folds became less popular.

Digital Wallets

As currency and payment methods diversified over time, so did wallets, and they continue to prosper. Over time, the technology behind these cards also advanced by leaps and bounds.

In the current era, digital wallets have arrived full force, and not just services like PayPal – that enable you to pay online – but services built into smartphones, like Apple Pay – which offer electronic transactions in brick-and-mortar stores. This introduction of electronic wallets on our smartphones reduced the number of cards we carry, leading to the growing popularity of minimalist wallets.

Despite all the changes and evolution over centuries, loyalty to traditional leather wallets remains strong. It seems that even with all our technology and toys, nothing stands equal to the feel and pleasure of carrying a leather wallet – sort of like carrying a piece of history in your pocket.