It’s a family exchange for many women: “I loved your dress.” “Thank you, he has pockets!” The spacious built -in bags are so coveted in female fashion that when they exist, they probably draw attention.
See the 2023 Met Gala look – A Vintage Chanel Dress, with pockets in which she managed to stick her hands, to the delight of many netizens, or Emma Stone’s decision to fill her hip over her hip on the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live.
Usable pockets seem to be an obvious feature to include in pieces ready to wear, but this is far from the case. It is standard that dresses and skirts do not have pockets, and when pockets exist in pants and blazers, they can be misleadingly small. Other times, they are just misleading, such as fake pockets that appear like a shallow border on a seam in a pair of jeans, or a jacket with tabs, but without real opening underneath.
However, the demand for pockets is clear. On the web, space fantasies find an audience with the same mindset, from the hyperfunctional creations of designer Nicole McLaughlin made with recycled materials to Y2K’s setback creator Erin Miller, which stucks childhood paraphernalia into their ancient Mary Poppins jeans. The question is repeated in forums and social networks: Why don’t women have as many pockets as men?
In large part, this was not the case of women, who at the time continued to wear handbags hanging from the belt. As men’s fashion evolved, it began to incorporate a variety of pockets, evident in the three -piece European suits, developed from the Persian cafts in the late 17th century, she noted.
Carlson found that he took centuries for women’s clothing to acquire practical pockets. Instead, they were overwhelmed with strange options, including tear -shaped bags sewn in skirts or tie pockets that always risk undoing.
For a brief period in the 1870s and 1880s, seamstresses placed pockets on the back of the angel, requiring users to slide their hands back and scour their belongings. When some French and British Amazons adopted riding over -pockets during the eighteenth century, they were nicknamed “Amazonas” – in honor of the warriors of Greek mythology – and criticized for their male garment.
The pockets have become associated with an adventurous and entrepreneurial spirit (and therefore masculine), as evidenced by the tools and reduced objects to fit inside them: the pocket knife, the pocket clock and the pocket pistol, to quote some. Carrying various objects with it was considered ingenious, according to Carlson – but not for women, whose pockets to tie, popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were compared to the female genitals by caricaturistic or ridiculed in writings of the time, with its size equaling the suspicion about what was inside.
Transporting many belongings had negative implications of gender and class, as well as the “absurdly spacious scholarship” of the final season of the TV series “Succession.” The comment was made by corporate clout Tom Wambsgans, seeing a large Burberry bag used by a woman from outside the intimate circle of the Roy family. (“What’s up inside?” Wambsgans speculated. “Low shoes to the subway? Her lunchbox? It’s gigantic. You could take her to camp. You could slide it on the floor after a bank robbery.”)
The pockets aroused a series of connotations for men who kept their hands inside them-criminal activity, sexual deviation, rebel attitudes-further reinforcing them as a distinctly male characteristic. But in essence, the pockets represented functional clothes, and female clothing should be decorative; These ideas crystallized during the Enlightenment, which also led men to abandon the high heels and the most ornate adornments, adopting more sober and standardized garments.
“Men’s fashion was systematized a century before female,” said Carlson. No tradition for female pockets, they were set aside; Instead, the bags have emerged as an entire market to store women’s items.
“It’s a combination of historical circumstance, contingency and sexism, all is like a perfect storm,” she said.
Utility versus adjustment
Bag displeased calls are not new – in fact, they joined the suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century, when women claimed the right to vote. Men walked the streets “free like an elbow,” complained activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, according to the pockets, while women were restricted to hold or carry their belongings.
Returning the anti -subfragile idea that vote was not a “natural right” of women, feminist poet Alice Duer Miller used the right to bags as a scathing metaphor in the 1915 publication, “Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Time” (women? A rhyme book for suffrage).
But with the modernization of female fashion in the West in the twentieth century, allowing users to abandon restrictive corsets and rounds and opted for a wider range of silhouettes, the pockets finally became part of everyday life. The war accelerated these changes, with more women needing practical costumes – which included pockets – when they joined the job market and enlisting themselves in the army.
On the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, fashion illustrations imagined new women’s versions of the component: pockets and pockets-style pockets in clothing, or pockets adapted to the needs of computer programmers (designed by Bonnie Cashin and illustrated by Andy Warhol in 1958) or to store tennis balls on the court.
In 1940, transformative designer Elsa Schiaparelli designed a gold embroidered tuxedo with cash and carry front pockets to replace the bag – and if the user had to have her hands free to hold her gas mask.
Still, sexist duplicity around the pockets remained present in absurd ways. In World War II, the 150,000 Army Women’s Volunteers (WAC), which served in non -combat roles, wore regulatory leather bags as part of their uniforms, which included fake pocket tabs. “Army designers cannot find out how to make a useful pocket for women; they get rid of their chest pockets because it is unsuitable to put their hands on their chest,” Carlson explained. As the organization was received with derision by the press and the public, “the uniform had to be as feminine as possible.”
In the postwar, and with the efforts of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, the pants became more widely accepted by women, but pocket sizes have not always followed. A 2018 study of the online cultural publication The Pudding, comparing skinny jeans and masculine and female straight jeans, found striking disparities of size, with female models often unable to behave basic personal items or the user’s hand.
Fast Fashion acceleration only complicated the situation, as non -essential items are devalued or discarded in an attempt to reduce prices. By this time, the idea is already firmly rooted: pockets are a data acquired for men’s, but disposable for women’s clothing.
The fashion industry “assumes that women will wear bags and don’t want to (invest) at work and extra costs,” said Carlson.
The pockets also continue to be seen as a break, as designers have emphasized clothes that raise the contours of the female body over the space to carry. This is not to say that the pockets never have a moment – the office pants are back (although some inexplicably have pockets without buttons) and the designers have been praised for bringing their pockets back to the catwalks. But their historic lack of availability makes them something to be noticed and noticed, a space to keep objects of desire that has become one of them.
Ultimately, the idea that “the fit is more important than utility” remained, said Carlson. This is even true for the “utility” styles – the wings of this writer, used during the report, has three fake pocket flaps on the chest and back. There may be greater concerns about women’s rights in any decade, but the pocket remains a small and screaming reminder of gender inequality and, frankly, a nuisance.
