At last week’s British Fashion Awards, a number of celebrities were snapped in stunning outfits, but for me the one that stood out was Florence Pugh in a floor-length backless burgundy Valentino dress. And while the dress itself was jaw dropping enough, what elevated it to the next level was the fact it had pockets. Yes, pockets.
There won’t be a girl or woman around who wouldn’t get excited by the fact that a dress has pockets. It turns a humble dress, one that you may try on and say, Oh yes, I suppose that looks good, to: Holy cow, this has pockets?!
Is it something that’s passed into our genetic code? Or more likely the simple fact is that women’s clothing rarely has pockets, which means when we find an outfit with pockets we literally swoon.
The thrill of pockets starts young. I remember going shopping with my daughter when she was around the age of seven. After she tried on a dress in the fitting room she ran out to excitedly tell me, “Mum, this dress has pockets!” She was so happy with it.
Her brothers don’t share the same thrill of pockets, because they take them for granted. I remember buying baby clothes for my boys and discovering they had pockets. Recently I went for a walk with my 11-year-old son and discovered that while the pockets in my jeans were too small to hold my iPhone, his pockets were roomy enough to hold it.
How ludicrous that a boy’s pants should have pockets large enough to hold a phone, but a grown woman’s jeans do not.
A few years ago, the publication The Pudding confirmed the pocket size discrepancy by measuring the size of pockets in a variety of men and women’s jeans. They found that the pockets in women’s jeans were a significant 48 per cent shorter than pockets in men’s jeans.
When the iPhone 6 came out, The Atlantic wrote about how not only did the phone highlight the impracticality of women’s pockets, it also made it very apparent that most women’s clothing didn’t even have pockets.
This was eight years ago. iPhone 14 is on the market and yet we still haven’t designed pockets in women’s clothes to fit them.
Women decrying the lack of pockets in their clothing isn’t a new thing. We’ve had articles written about it, surveys carried out about it, social media hashtags about it, not to mention the endless conversations women have had with each other about their love of pockets. Yet nothing has changed. The fashion industry for some reason stubbornly refuses to cater to demand.
There are independent female-run businesses who are trying to bring about change, but they are still small and bespoke fashion brands. When are the larger fashion manufacturers going to catch on?
To many, the lack of pockets in women’s clothes is a feminist issue. Women’s clothes didn’t historically have pockets because it was expected that their fathers and husbands would carry the money, and women didn’t need to.
All the way back in 1899, a New York Times piece made the claim: “As we become more civilized, we need more pockets. No pocketless people has ever been great since pockets were invented, and the female sex cannot rival us while it is pocketless.”
In 1954, the designer Christian Dior said: “Men have pockets to keep things in, women for decoration.”
Despite the many advances we’ve made in women’s causes, for some reason the pocket revolution is yet to take hold. Women’s clothing is still mostly being designed with aesthetics in mind, while men’s clothing is designed for usability.
As for Florence Pugh, we know the actress is a big fan of pockets, as seen in this Instagram post:
Pugh played the character Yelena in the film Black Widow, and in it she talks about pockets in what became one of the film’s most iconic bits of dialogue.
"OK, it has a lot of pockets,” Yelena says of the black vest she wears. “But I use them all the time and I made some of my own modifications. The point is, I’ve never had control over my own life before, and now I do. I want to do things."
