Sweet Candy Vintage Cat Wallet

A long cat wallet that shuts with a paw-shaped stud

Two things hold this one closed, and you use them differently. The camel tab is the quick one: it drops from the top edge to the middle of the panel and presses onto a silver stud engraved with a paw pad, so a thumb is enough. The zip is the slower one, running the full width of the top edge with a flat metal pull, and the tab lies flat over it when the wallet is shut. Worth knowing if you are weighing this one up against the other long formats on the wallet page.

One side crowded with frames, the other scattered with prints

The back is the busy face. A dusty grey-pink wall carries a row of antique frames: a white cat in a gilt surround, a black cat wearing a grey ribbon in a big baroque frame, two tabbies sharing a grey one on the right. Around them sit a clock face, an ornate key, a blue and white medallion, and a shelf holding a jug, a tea caddy and a terracotta vase. The front is the calm one by comparison, just paw prints drawn by hand, some filled in, some left as outlines, in sizes that shift from one print to the next.

Olive trim, silver script and a woven heart tab

A band of olive runs along the bottom of both faces and does the quiet work of tying the whole thing together. The brand name sits on it in silver cursive lettering, a pale topstitch picks out its upper edge, and the little cat head applique on the front is cut from exactly the same olive. A small woven label stamped with a red heart pokes out from the side seam. Take the olive away and you have two unrelated prints; keep it and they read as one object.

18 × 10 × 4 cm, measured against a small crossbody

Four centimetres of depth is what tells you this is a long wallet rather than a card holder, and it is also the figure to check first if you carry a small crossbody, because depth is what those bags run out of before length. Ten centimetres of height keeps it low enough that the bag opening is rarely the sticking point, and eighteen of length means notes go in flat instead of folded. If the coins are what make a wallet bulge, the coin purses listed alongside handle that separately.

Who tends to pick this one

It is a wallet for someone who likes the joke on the inside of the bag rather than on the outside. Shut, flat on a table, you mostly see olive trim and silver script; open the bag and the cats turn up. And because the two faces are different, it does not look the same twice over: it depends which way up it lands.