I Googled “can women use men’s wallet” last night at around eleven PM for personal reasons that I’ll explain, and Google autofilled this whole question before I could even search it. Which means two things. First: Stop whatever you’re doing and google it yourself to confirm. Second: We all know this is a question, whether we’d like to admit it verbally. I promise you I wasn’t googling this for the purposes of content. I literally just needed to know if women could use men’s wallets because my sister stole mine from my kitchen counter two weeks ago and has used it every day since, and when I asked her this past weekend if I could have it back she gave me some look like fuck you why do you need your wallet back did you forget whose wallet this is actually?
The above paragraph sums up this entire article.
Except instead of ranting about it in the abstract I asked my sister for it back, she said some variation of the above, and now I have to unpack why her thinking was wrong after the fact instead of reading Twitter like a normal human being.
OK, real talk. And please understand I gave this a normal amount of thought, crazy iPhone owner, before settling on this opinion: the distinction between “men’s wallet” and “women’s wallet” is one of the stupidest divides menswear makes. I say that as someone who works in menswear, who currently owns four wallets scattered across various bags and rooms in my apartment (at least two more than anyone needs, seriously) and who has literally made money in my career defending gendered product lines that exist mostly so retailers can sell you two versions of the same damn rectangle.
What My Sister Actually Taught Me By Stealing Mine
The wallet I had was, objectively, a better wallet. A slim bifold. No coin pocket. Card slots on both sides. The kind of wallet I intentionally bought because it didn’t stick out of my back pocket and felt skinny enough not to look like a brick when I pulled it out to pay for something. My sister—who is also way into having a functional wallet, here’s the thing, I get why she made the swap—said her wallet was “too much.” That was her word, not mine. Big card slots that didn’t fit her cards perfectly. Flaps that didn’t lay flat. The logo on the front made her feel like she was carrying a purse charm rather than a wallet. Mine just held cards and cash. And it closed flat. That’s literally all it did.
I couldn’t argue with her then, and I couldn’t argue with her now, because that is literally how I feel about most women’s accessories designed to my specifications. Too much! It’s happened with belts, with bags, with wallets. A men’s wallet—when it’s actually well designed—will always be primarily a wallet that was crafted by someone who assumed the guy using it would prefer function over form. That’s not masculine, that’s not inclusive/exclusive language, that’s just good design principles being applied to a product that just happens to get labeled “mens” because of who Target thinks is browsing that section.
The gendering isn’t having its buckle customized or choosing the thread color. The gendering is the sales pitch and where that product ends up on eBay, and that is not a line that needs drawn.
I DM’ed a slightly less coherent version of this hot take into my group chat mostly just ranting about the coffee stain she left on it when she gave it back but never acknowledged herself, and one of my friends just replied with “wallets don’t have a gender, wallets have a wallet.” Best summary I’ve read all day, and definitely better than anything I’ve written so far, so I’m stealing it and you can thank me.
Where Things Get Sort Of Murky and Where They Don’t
Alright, but are women’s wallets sometimes just different than men’s? Sure. Kind of. Men’s wallets will traditionally be longer because they’re built around folded bills and a bifold shape that’s been optimized over time, so if you’re coming from a pint sized wallet with more room for a phone you’re used to carrying around they’ll feel overstuffed in a small purse or pocket. That’s fair! It’s literally called SIZE FOR A REASON, and same as with jackets you’re not wrong to care about those numbers. But that has nothing to do with gender. That’s a discussion about carrying different items, which gets conflated with gender because it’s the first
second thing we think about when we see something labeled “women’s” or “mens.”
The other thing that can legitimately be different is card capacity and coins. Though let me just tell you that cuts against men’s wallets more than it does women’s, because a LOT of women’s wallets have this weird horseshoe shape because they’re designed to also be carrying change and a phone and basically every item they own all at once, so they end up chunky and bulky instead of slim-lined like you were probably actually looking for. She wasn’t downgrading her wallet when she stole mine. Honestly she was upgrading from her point of view, which is the thing folks forget whenever this conversation comes up.
Not every woman is trying to fit into a men’s version because that’s the only thing that’ll work. Sometimes that men’s wallet is objectively the better product when it comes to doing what a wallet should do, which is fit your cards and close.
I ended up getting my wallet back, coffee stain included, but a few weeks later I gifted her the exact same men’s wallet model for her birthday because this was getting ridiculous and I already knew what the outcome would be. She loves it. I checked. Not exaggerating. Her new wallet is literally in her bag as we speak, likely has a receipt folded in half that doesn’t belong there, and nobody at Trader Joe’s is questioning her ability to use a men’s wallet.
Women can use men’s wallets. Fuck off and wonder why we gender shoes but not pants. The question never was can they, it’s why do we?
Jamie is in his early twenties, lives in Manchester and makes menswear content for a living. He writes about whatever’s actually trending this week, fast and a bit chaotic, and he’ll happily tell you when he got it wrong.
