Woven straw wallet in blue shade

Slim enough to live at the bottom of a tote

Depth is what usually rules a wallet out of a small bag, and this one barely has any: it lies flat once zipped, so it settles along the base of a tote instead of propping the whole thing open. It also slides into the outside pocket of a rucksack, which most long wallets are simply too thick for. If you are weighing it up against the rest of our zip-around wallets for everyday carry, thickness is the difference you will notice first.

Blues that carry the pattern, lime and purple that break it up

Read the front closely and no two rows repeat. Teal and sky blue do most of the work, brown and beige warm them up from underneath, and every so often a strand of lime or purple cuts across a row and stops the whole thing settling into one flat tone. Seen from a distance the effect is closer to a marled knit than to a printed pattern, which is why it sits more easily with plain clothes than a bold print would.

What actually fits inside

Unzipped, the interior is lined in black and built around a single central zipped pocket, with two open gusseted sections either side. The photographs show no stitched card slots: folded notes, coins, a locker key and a boarding pass all have somewhere to go, while a bank card slips flat into one of the gussets rather than into a slot of its own. Worth knowing before you buy if what you really want is a card holder.

Summer outfits it sits well with

Straw reads as holiday, but the blue keeps this one on the right side of the line: it works with a linen shirt and crumpled trousers just as well as with a denim jacket on a cooler evening. Because the pattern is busy rather than loud, it tends to look better held against plain fabric than against stripes. Carry it with one of our bags in the same woven straw and the two pick up each other's texture.

A woven straw wallet with a gold-toned zip all the way round

The fastening is the part you handle most, so it is worth describing properly. The zip turns three corners, which means the wallet opens right out flat rather than gaping at one end, and the teal tape keeps the metal from looking brassy against the straw. The ecru tassel earns its place here: it gives the fingers something to find at the bottom of a bag, and it is long enough to grip without looking for the puller itself.