I bought this wallet in the summer of 2015, on a whim, from a small leather goods shop in Melbourne that I have since lost the name of. It cost ninety-five dollars, which felt like a lot at the time. I had been carrying a money clip and a frustration. The Bellroy was the third wallet I tried that year. It was, it turns out, the last one.
It is small — about the size of a deck of cards, half as thick. It holds eight cards, some folded bills, a few business cards I keep for sentimental reasons, and a single Polaroid that has lived in a hidden compartment since 2017. The leather, when I bought it, was a rich tobacco brown. It is now darker on the side that rides against the body, and lighter on the side that sees the air. I am told this is called patina. What it actually is, is a record.
What eleven years does
The corners are soft now. The edges, where the leather was once cut clean, are fuzzed where my thumb has riffed through cards in a thousand parking lots. The thread, which is white, is gray. There is a small dark spot on the back from a coffee in 2019 that I remember the morning of but not the city. The little silk pull-tab — Bellroy's signature — is frayed at the end. I have, twice, cut the loose threads with the same knife I write about above.
An object that survives long enough becomes a record of you, and not the other way around.
What it is for
It is for paying for things. It is, at its best, exactly that small. You don't shuffle through receipts in it. You don't carry change in it. You carry the cards you actually use, the bills you actually need, and one folded thing that matters to you. The Hide & Seek's small genius is that it is the right size for that, and not the size of any wallet you currently own.
What didn't survive
The brass coin pocket lining gave out around year six — a small split in the seam I never bothered to repair. I stopped carrying coins anyway; the world stopped, mostly, accepting them. The hidden compartment's flap is looser than it was. Twice now I have nearly lost the Polaroid. I should sew it. I won't.
The small case
You can spend more on a wallet. You can spend less. You can buy a different brand every two years for the rest of your life and end up, at sixty, with a drawer of mediocre wallets and no memory of any of them. Or you can buy one good wallet, once, and carry it long enough that it becomes part of how you think about pockets. This is the case for considered gear. It is also the case for this wallet.