Why Women's Clothes Lost Their Pockets
Why Women's Clothes Lost Their Pockets
Women had better pockets than men for two hundred years, and then fashion took them away.
This is one of the few questions in clothing where the answer is documented, specific, and almost nobody knows it.
Men Got Them Sewn In
Sewn in pockets arrived in men's clothing in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A man could carry his own things, on his own body, without asking anyone for help or handing anything over.
Women Tied Them On
Women carried tie on pockets instead. They were made in pairs, hung from a linen tape knotted at the waist, worn under the skirts, and reached through slits cut into the side seams. They were in use from roughly 1650 to the late nineteenth century, across every class, from duchesses to washerwomen.
They were enormous, and they were portable. One pair moved from dress to dress. Sewing your first pair was a rite of passage for a girl.
Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux wrote the first full length study of them, The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women's Lives, 1660 to 1900, published by Yale in 2019. They worked partly from Old Bailey court records, because thieves had to list what they took. Coins, watches, gloves, jewelry, mirrors, letters, sewing tools, food.
Then the Silhouette Changed
In the late eighteenth century the shape of a dress narrowed. Neoclassical gowns clung, and anything carried underneath showed as a lump. The pockets came off.
The handbag arrived to replace them. That is the whole story. Women did not stop needing to carry things. The clothes stopped allowing it, and then a bag was sold to solve the problem the clothes had created.
The Victoria and Albert Museum holds surviving pairs. Embroidered, quilted, worn thin at the opening from a hand going in and out for forty years.
What We Do About It
A pocket is not a detail. It is the difference between a garment that works and one that only photographs.
The WOMAN pants carry our tear drop back pockets with the signature swoop stitch, and pocket bags in rose red, which is a story of its own. Deep enough for a hand. Sewn to take the weight of what a hand puts in them.
Cut them right and nobody ever thinks about them again. That is the job.
A Way Of Life.
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