Whatever happened to the Long Lady Wallet? That long and lean financial accessory, proportioned for a checkbook, and fitted with an interior cash pocket and slots for perhaps a dozen credit cards. Maybe you recall your mother or grandmother or aunt wielding one at the grocery store checkout. Once upon a time, owning a Long Lady Wallet–or LLW, as I like to call it, or “continental wallet,” as it’s more officially named–seemed like an essential part of making transactions.. Now it’s all but defunct, a vestige of the non-digital economy. And a vestige, too, of an era when adultness was a bit more defined and refined.
Maybe I’m wondering if it’s time to revive the Long Lady Wallet. After all, it’s super-efficient to wave an iPhone at an ApplePay reader and–ping!–call it a day, but, in my experience, that same efficiency makes spending money freakishly easy, a little too frictionless as if I’m paying with seemingly virtual cash. I have trouble tracking my spending. Debit cards aren’t much better, in this regard. And half the time, I can’t even find my debit card: I go digging around my handbag, unearth my little card case streaked with leaked concealer and bloated with faded receipts, and realize I’ve left said card in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Perhaps this payment derangement is because purchasing things has lost all formality. There’s no ritual of opening up a wallet, getting your card out of its allotted slot, handing it over to be swiped by an actual human being, and, at the end of a focused transition of money for goods and services, putting it back where it belongs.
Two near-simultaneous events focused my thinking about the LLW. One was a harrowing credit card statement. (Ping! Ping! Ping! It adds up, as do interest charges.) The other was Balenciaga’s Spring 2024 collection that showed passport holders that were actually wallets, which perfectly housed a slim old-school style airplane ticket. Something about the contrast between my swipe-siphoned bank account and a wallet figuratively full of possibility made me recall the “Ring a Ding Ding” episode of Sex and the City where Carrie, broke, tries to apply for a loan; meanwhile, Samantha is showing off a beautiful quilted Chanel wallet. There’s an obvious distinction between a woman with a wallet, who is in control of her financial destiny, and another woman who considers her closet full of Manolos a savings account.
Resolved to become that woman in control of her economic destiny with some legal tender to spare, I bought a thin, obsidian Cartier wallet for $60 on a resale website. Beauty and brains, this LLW. It’s like a tiny library, with no-nonsense slots for a Dewey Decimal system of credit cards, a zipper pocket for loose coins, and two long pockets for cash or checks. Since using the wallet, I haven’t lost any debit or credit cards. I carry cash, which allows me to keep a rough account of how much I’m spending per day on sundries like coffee. My purchase of this Long Lady Wallet also had a halo effect over other parts of my financial life: I checked my credit card bills, deleted half-forgotten subscriptions, and called my accountant to prepare for the upcoming tax season. The LLW had become a harbinger of budgetary order.
