Many years ago I was considering buying one. I was in my early twenties and highly susceptible to clothing associated with Y2K anxiety. Consider activewear similar to North Face’s for those who largely avoid physical exertion. The piece is a hooded gray jacket; while it lacks any of the futuristic, weatherproof materials that actual out-and-out folks would value, I’m attracted to all the pockets—zips, Velcro flaps, and mesh Ribbon festival. There’s a wallet-sized pocket inside, perfect for a pack of cigarettes. There are roomy quilted slant pockets on the sides, big enough for gloves or a Discman (this was a 2000 model), and two roomy chest pockets with Velcro closures. I checked one out and found that it was removable and had a series of built-in microfiber dividers. The pocket is actually a slim CD wallet. I was sold.
Many of us buy clothes just for the clever pockets—for me, a pair of jeans with a dime bag-sized hidden compartment in the inner thigh seam is particularly memorable. But is this little thought purely out of pragmatism, or does it reflect some deeper psychological need?
From CDs to seeds, coins, beads: Humans have always carried things with them, and for most of our history, a school bag hanging around the neck or a pouch hung around the waist was enough. In the Middle Ages, both men and women wore pouches tied around their waists or hung from belts. To protect privacy, people folded their clothes on top of these bags and cut slits to make items easier to access. Then, sometime in the sixteenth century, European men began asking tailors for pockets.
No one knows exactly why. As Hannah Carlson writes in her wide-ranging Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Tight (Algonquin Press), Pockets have no clear starting point and no records of epiphany. One popular theory is that men, noticing the amount of padding needed to properly fill breeches, began using the space to store small items. (One speculates that some truly imaginative men also use their passwords in this way.) The difference between a drop-in pocket sewn into clothing and a pouch worn around the waist doesn’t seem so radical. They both provide storage space close to the body. Yet their emergence has shaped attitudes toward privacy and decorum, gender and empire, and what it means to be “cool” or “ready for the future” over the past five hundred years. There is no single history of pockets, but there is an egregious history of people trying to deny others the privilege of using pockets.
The pockets, while practical, give them a sense of mystery. “Once the wearer puts something into his pocket, it disappears, folds up, and seems to be absorbed into indeterminate depths,” Carlson writes.
What’s in your pocket? Maybe something mundane: a shopping list, a handkerchief, a small bottle of hand sanitizer. In nineteenth-century England, tailors would place an old halfpenny in the pocket of a man’s new suit for good luck. Some people believe that carrying a lemon in your pocket can ward off negative energy. Thomas Jefferson was known to carry a thermometer, measuring compass, spirit level, writing instrument, mini globe, and notebook in his pockets. Theodore Roosevelt is said to have survived an assassination attempt in 1912 because he folded a 50-page speech in half and a metal spectacle case in his breast pocket slowed the bullet. Barack Obama once said in an interview that he always carries a good luck charm with him, drawn from a bowl of small souvenirs given to him by people he met during the campaign. That day, he emptied his pockets and pulled out a completely random sample of items representing the world’s religions, along with poker chips given to him by a swing-state biker.
Maybe what you’re hiding is your own anxieties. “Pockets give your hands something to do, which can be a boon when you find yourself at a party and realize that your hands may be giving away your nervousness,” Carlson writes. Symbolic The point is, many of us desire fuller rather than flatter pockets. However, bulging pockets can quickly become unsightly—the silhouette of an iPhone in skinny jeans—and even obscene. “Do you have a gun in your pocket,” Mae West asks in “Sextet,” “or are you just happy to see me?”
Real guns were one of the earliest causes of pocket-related scares. The advent of wheel-lock pistols in the early sixteenth century reduced the size of firearms to the point where they could be easily concealed. These new “pocket gadgets” and the fact that they could be “carried privately” troubled the British monarchy. In 1579, a regulation was enacted prohibiting firearms that “may be concealed in a pocket, or in a place like a person’s body, secretly concealed or carried.” While the French are also worried about concealed guns, their approach to gun control is half-hearted. In 1564, Henry III restricted the amount of stuffing in men’s long hose and banned the use of pockets of a certain size. (In the United States in the late nineteenth century, state legislatures considered banning new back or seat pockets on men’s trousers for similar reasons, calling them “pistol pockets.”)
As the poet Harold Nemerov once said, the broader fear is that pockets are “in the place of desire.” Carlson cited an eighteenth-century etiquette manual that warned men not to put their hands in their pockets because only “vulgar boys” would do so. A British cartoonist made fun of a group of young people standing calmly with their hands in their pockets. Carlson believed that this new posture became an expression of “freedom from social obligations and constraints” because men ignored the “necessities of politeness.”
Walt Whitman’s 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass popularized this emerging attitude. In an era when serious writers preferred to portray themselves in well-tailored clothes, impeccable poses, and a solemn and joyless atmosphere, the portrait of the author in the frontispiece of Whitman’s book was considered by many to be provocative. “Rather than standing upright, Whitman tilted his hat, eyebrows, and hips at similar tilted angles, allowing his weight to fall unevenly,” Carlson wrote. He wore simple canvas pants and a collared shirt. One arm on your hip, the other in your pocket. One critic concluded that both the man and his books were “rude, vulgar, and vulgar,” and Whitman later recalled the “fire of criticism” sparked by the portrait. For Carlson, who was particularly victorious in her reading of body language, Whitman’s stance was one of “glorious hostility.” She believes that not extending one’s hands may be interpreted as isolating oneself from others, suggesting an attitude of “emotional unavailability or detachment.” One person seems too calm to care, too cool to bother reaching out.
In an 1894 issue Harper’s BazaarOne writer compared the pockets available to different members of her family. “I’m often minus one,” she wrote, while her husband was fourteen. Her daughters, three, and her sons, seven, were “stuffed with bits and pieces.” The boy’s pockets, she declared, “were his imperial credentials.” “This little man stands with his hands in his pockets, surveying his little world with the attitude of a conqueror. He will carry with him the scepter of domination throughout his life, and regardless of his status, he will carry with him the power of war.”
It goes to show how haphazardly ingrained male privilege is, and how I never understood how privileged I was. I know basically nothing about the issue of “pocket equality”; I’ve never said or heard “it. have.pocket“. A study a few years ago showed that women’s jeans pockets are about 48% shorter and 6.5% narrower than men’s jeans pockets. Only 10 percent of women’s jeans fit women’s hands. 60% of women Pockets won’t fit an iPhone : “Why are men’s clothing so full of integrated, sewn-in pockets, but women’s clothing so few? “
While men’s pockets evolved from jodhpurs and became popular with trousers, women’s clothing took longer to adapt. In 1790s Britain, the tote bag (a small bag usually worn around the wrist) provided some relief. (Previously, women had to reach inside petticoats to reach bags worn under clothes.) But handbags were often small and could hold only a few coins, reflecting the fact that women were prohibited from owning too many things at the time. Over time, this state of men and women being “differently included” takes on a narrative dimension. Men have pockets because they have important jobs; women are not only unwilling to work, but frustrated by the desire for money because what are they going to do with it anyway? “If women did Take advantage of fully functional pockets? ” A 19th-century tailor said: “Not everyone wants to carry a revolver, but a large percentage do, and have no hesitation in saying so. “
Pockets and their association with men’s clothing raise anxieties about women’s access to public spaces. “The more stuff women could carry, the greater their freedom of movement,” Carlson wrote. The Society for Rational Dress was formed in London in 1881 to lobby against unnecessary tight clothing and in favor of more practical, functional and wholesome styles such as culottes. In the early twentieth century, the suffragette movement linked suffrage politics to other forms of mobility. The introduction of the “Suffragette Suit” in 1910 (the forerunner of the pantsuit) was a turning point in women’s sartorial possibilities. “There are lots of pockets in the suffragette suit,” in New York era Title announced.
In 1915, writer Alice Doyle Miller published a collection of satirical poems, Are Women Human? forum. One of her poems satirized the backlash against the suffragettes and their pursuit of “pocket equality”, titled “Why We Are Against Women’s Pockets.” The reasons range from the tranquility of the family – “a man can’t be chivalrous if he doesn’t have to carry all her belongings in his pocket” – to the fact that a man uses his pockets to carry more important things than a woman thing. , such as tobacco, whiskey bottles, chewing gum, and “compromise letters.”
