Many years ago, I was deliberating over a purchase. I was in my early twenties, deeply susceptible to clothing that spoke to Y2K anxiety. Think North Face-adjacent activewear for people who largely avoid physical exertion. The piece in question was a hooded gray jacket; although it lacked any of the futuristic, weatherproof materials prized by people who actually go outside, I was drawn to all the pockets—a festival of zippers, Velcro flaps, and mesh webbing. There was an interior pocket the size of a wallet, and one perfect for a pack of cigarettes. There were roomy, quilted slash pockets along the side that were ample enough for gloves or a Discman—this was the early two-thousands—and two generous chest pockets with Velcro enclosures. I checked one of them, and realized it was detachable, with a series of built-in microfibre dividers inside. The pocket was really a slim CD wallet. I was sold.
Many of us have bought items of clothing simply because of clever pockets—for me, a pair of jeans with a hidden compartment the size of a dime bag along the seam of the inner thigh is particularly memorable. But is this pocket preoccupation purely a matter of pragmatism or does it reflect some deeper psychological need?
From CDs to seeds, coins, beads: human beings have always carried things with them, and for much of our history a satchel worn around the neck, or a pouch attached at the waist, sufficed. In medieval times, men and women alike wore small bags tied to their waist or suspended by belts. For privacy, people layered clothing over these bags, cutting slits to provide easy access to their possessions. And then, at some point in the sixteenth century, European men began asking their tailors for pockets.
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Nobody’s quite sure why. As Hannah Carlson writes in her delightfully wide-ranging “Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close” (Algonquin), there is no definitive starting point for pockets, no recorded epiphanies. A popular theory is that men, noticing the amount of padding necessary to properly plump their breeches, began using this space for storing small items instead. (There is speculation that some truly imaginative men used their codpieces this way, too.) The distinction between an inset pocket, sewn into a garment, and a small pouch worn at the waist doesn’t seem all that radical. They both provide storage close to the body. And yet their introduction shaped attitudes over the past five hundred years around privacy and decorum, gender and empire, what it means to be cool or simply ready for wherever the day may take us. There’s no single history of the emergence of the pocket, but there is a striking history of people trying to deny others the privilege of its use.
As practical as they are, pockets offer a sense of mystery. “Once the wearer places something inside their pocket,” Carlson writes, “that thing disappears, enfolded and seemingly absorbed into uncertain depths.”
What’s in your pockets? Maybe it’s something mundane: a shopping list, a handkerchief, a small bottle of hand sanitizer. In nineteenth-century England, tailors would place old halfpennies in the pockets of a man’s new suit for good luck. Some people believe that carrying a lemon in your pocket wards off negative energy. Thomas Jefferson was known to carry in his pockets a thermometer, a surveying compass, a level, writing instruments, a mini globe, and a notebook. Theodore Roosevelt is said to have survived a 1912 assassination attempt because a fifty-page speech folded in half and a metal glasses case in his breast pocket slowed the bullet. Barack Obama once said in an interview that he always kept a lucky charm on him, drawn from a bowl of small souvenirs given to him by people he had met while campaigning. That day, he emptied his pockets to reveal an entirely random sampling of items representing the world’s religions, along with a poker chip given to him by a swing-state biker.
Maybe what you’re hiding is your own anxiety. “Pockets give you something to do with your hands,” Carlson writes, and “that can be a boon when you find yourself at some gathering and realize that your hands are likely to betray your nervousness.” Symbolically, many of us aspire after pockets that are fat, not flat. Yet a bulging pocket quickly tips toward the unsightly—the outline of an iPhone in a pair of skinny jeans—or even the concupiscent. “Is that a gun in your pocket,” Mae West asked in “Sextette,” “or are you just happy to see me?”
Actual firearms are what caused one of the first panics associated with pockets. The emergence of the wheel-lock pistol, in the early sixteenth century, reduced the size of firearms to something that could be easily concealed. These new “pocket dags,” and the fact that they could be “carried privily,” vexed the British monarchy. In 1579, a regulation was enacted banning guns “that may be hid in a Pocket, or like Place about a Man’s Body, to be hid or carried covertly.” Although the French were also worried about concealed firearms, their approach to gun control was halfhearted. In 1564, Henri III limited the amount of padding within men’s trunk hose and banned pockets of a certain size. (In the late-nineteenth-century United States, state legislatures considered banning the new back or seat pockets on men’s trousers for similar reasons, calling them “pistol pockets.”)
A more ambient fear was that pockets, as the poet Howard Nemerov once remarked, “locate close to lust.” Carlson cites etiquette manuals of the eighteenth century that cautioned against men keeping their hands in their pockets as something only “vulgar Boys” did. Caricaturists in England poked fun at the hordes of young people standing about coolly with their hands in their pockets. Carlson suggests that this new pose became an expression of “freedom from social obligations and restraint,” as men ignored “the imperative to be polite.”
The publication of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” in 1855, popularized this burgeoning attitude. At a time when serious authors preferred to depict themselves with tailored clothing, impeccable posture, and an air of serious joylessness, the frontispiece of Whitman’s book featured a portrait of the author that many found provocative. “Rather than stand upright, Whitman tips hat, eyebrow, and hips at a similar rakish angle, letting his weight fall unevenly,” Carlson writes. He’s wearing simple canvas trousers and a collared shirt. One arm is held akimbo, while the opposite hand is in his pocket. A reviewer concluded that the man and his book were both “rough, uncouth, vulgar,” and Whitman later recalled the “great fire of criticism” invoked by this portrait. For Carlson, who is particularly winning when she’s interpreting body language, Whitman’s stance is one of “glorious hostility.” Not showing one’s hands, she argues, could be read as closing oneself off from another, suggesting an attitude of “emotional inaccessibility or disengagement.” One seems too cool to care, too self-possessed to bother extending a hand.
In an 1894 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, a writer compared the pockets available to the various members of her household. “I frequently am minus even one,” she wrote, while her husband had fourteen. Her daughter had three while her son had seven, “crammed to bursting with odds and ends.” The boy’s pockets “are his certificate of empire,” she proclaimed. “Standing with hands in pockets, the miniature man surveys his little world with the port of a conqueror. All through life he will carry the sceptre of dominion by right of his pockets, in which, whatever his degree, he will carry the sinews of war.”
It’s a sign of how casually entrenched male privilege is that I never understood how good I’ve had it. I was largely ignorant of the issue of “pocket equality”; I had never uttered or heard the phrase “It. Has. Pockets.” A study from a few years ago suggested that the pockets in women’s jeans are about forty-eight per cent shorter and 6.5 per cent narrower than those found in men’s jeans. Only ten per cent of women’s jeans can even fit a female hand. Sixty per cent of women’s pockets can’t fit the iPhone X. And that’s if you have pockets at all. Many women’s slacks, dresses, and blazers are still manufactured with fake, decorative pockets. It’s one of the animating questions of Carlson’s book, and these sections traffic in fiery consternation: “Why is it that men’s clothes are full of integrated, sewn-in pockets, while women’s have so few?”
While men’s pockets evolved from breeches and gained popularity with trousers, women’s clothing took much longer to adapt. In seventeen-nineties England, the reticule, a pouch usually carried on the wrist, provided some relief. (Previously, women would have to reach inside their petticoats to access bags worn beneath the clothes.) But reticules were often small, fitting little more than a few coins, reflecting the fact that women were prohibited from owning very much in those days. Over time, this state of men and women being “differently pocketed” took on a narrative dimension. Men had pockets because they were engaged in important work; women were discouraged not just from working but from coveting pockets, because what would they do with them anyway? What might happen “if women did make use of perfectly functional pockets?” One nineteenth-century tailor was quoted as saying, “Not all of them want to carry a revolver but a large percentage do and make no ‘bones’ about saying so.”
Pockets—and their association with men’s clothing—attended anxieties over women entering public space. “The more women could carry, the more freedom they potentially had to act,” Carlson writes. In 1881, the Rational Dress Society was founded, in London, to lobby against needlessly constrictive clothing and in favor of styles that were more functional, utilitarian, and better for health, like divided skirts. In the early twentieth century, the suffragette movement tied the politics of voting rights with other forms of mobility. The 1910 introduction of the “suffragette suit”—a precursor to the pants suit—was a turning point in the possibility of women’s dress. “Plenty of Pockets in Suffragette Suit,” a New York Times headline proclaimed.
In 1915, the writer Alice Duer Miller published “Are Women People?,” a collection of satirical poems that had appeared in the New York Tribune. One of her poems, lampooning the backlash against suffragettes and their quest for “pocket equality,” was titled “Why We Oppose Pockets for Women.” The reasons range from domestic tranquillity—a man would not be able to exhibit chivalry “if he did not have to carry all her things in his pocket”—to the fact that men used their pockets to carry far more important things than women ever would, such as tobacco, whiskey flasks, chewing gum, and “compromising letters.”
In the late nineteen-thirties, Diana Vreeland, then a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, proposed an entire issue of the magazine “just showing what you can do with pockets.” She had grown tired of handbags and wanted to encourage designers to experiment with pockets that could be both functional and “rather chic.” In response, Claire McCardell designed the “pop over,” a stylish, modern take on the frumpy housedress which featured a large, off-center patch pocket. In the fifties, the designer Bonnie Cashin patented the hands-free purse-pocket, which became a signature feature of her coats and skirts. One of her iconic pieces was a raincoat with an appliquéd strap connected to a roomy pocket along the side, mimicking the look of a shoulder bag.
Not everyone embraced these changes. In 1954, Christian Dior observed, “Men have pockets to keep things in, women for decoration.” Dior had little interest in their utility; he saw the pocket as an opportunity for aesthetic experimentation. Some were pointy and “whisked out beyond the shoulders,” Carlson notes; others “flopped high over the breasts rather disconcertingly.” Few could carry much more than a handkerchief.
One of the reasons that women’s pockets never fully evolved was the prevailing sense that women didn’t need them, since they already had handbags. This explains why Vreeland met resistance at Harper’s Bazaar—why jeopardize a business relationship with the entire handbag industry? During the Second World War, when thousands of women volunteered for the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, they were given uniforms that lacked the pockets of their male counterparts’. Their skirts lacked them altogether, while, Carlson explains, “working breast pockets in the women’s coats were judged to be unsuitable, an embarrassment that upset the delicate balance between correct military appearance and femininity.” Instead, a recruitment poster for the W.A.A.C. featured a battalion of women marching in lockstep, their leader with a handbag slung across her shoulder.
Barbs about the size and contents of women’s handbags—in 1957, Joyce Brothers ventured that stuffing one’s purse was the sign of a “compulsive worrier”—have long belied the fact that they fulfill a need ill-served by women’s clothing. Yet even though a purse can feel as intimate as a man’s pocket, it doesn’t enjoy the same legal protection. In 1999, the Supreme Court heard the case of Wyoming v. Houghton, and reviewed the argument that a search of a woman’s purse during a routine traffic stop was unconstitutional. Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, argued that searching a purse no more encroached on an individual’s privacy than searching a briefcase or a knapsack, denying, Carlson says, “the societal understanding that a purse is as private as a billfold carried in one’s pocket.” Not only were women denied the privilege of functional pockets; they couldn’t enjoy the privacy they afforded, either.
In 1998, Massimo Osti, the Italian designer and streetwear visionary famed for his labels C. P. Company and Stone Island, collaborated with Dockers on a new line. Jackets and sneakers were already future-facing—why not pants? Osti’s designs, which he called “equipment for legs,” updated Dockers (synonymous then and now with a kind of normie resignation) for new, uncertain times. A Dockers executive explained, “We identified a group we called ‘nomads’ who are constantly on the move, always in taxis or airports and needing to be wired, so we began looking for partners.”
Osti’s Dockers are now collectibles, and when you look at them online it’s remarkable what an aesthetic difference the angle of a pocket makes. His designs feature interior pockets, hidden pockets underneath side cargo pouches, and a Velcro enclosure alongside the entire rear which keeps back pockets safe. Soon after, Levi Strauss asked Osti to design a new line of clothes in the burgeoning field of “wearable technology.” In 2000, Levi Strauss and Philips débuted the ICD+ line, which featured jackets with pockets designed to house Philips electronics products, such as a then revolutionary MP3 player. Carlson notes that this collaboration “received an inordinate amount of press but sold poorly.”
Most of the pockets we covet today grow out of the eighteen-hundreds, with the emergence of large-scale manufacturing and the ready-to-wear industry. The patch pocket—which once marked the laboring classes as unsophisticated and unfashionable—is far more useful than one sized for a watch, a ticket, or a coin. The flittering popularity of cargo pants, fishing vests, or camping gear over the past decade has little to do with their original, intended use. Instead, they signify efficiency and preparedness. The writer James Agee was prescient in romanticizing the aesthetics of workwear, of bright, white seams against dark, indigo denim. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” the 1941 book he published with Walker Evans about Depression-era farmers, Agee admired “the complexed seams of utilitarian pockets,” the ingenious way a pencil, a ruler, or a watch was never far from hand. He remarked that these men looked as if they were wearing blueprints.
Pockets have always figured in visions of how we might dress in the future. Carlson points to the utopian depictions of advanced societies which always seem to dress humans in flowy, unrestrictive casual wear. In “The Shape of Things to Come,” H. G. Wells proposes a future where people wouldn’t even need pockets, because they would be free from material desire. “A socialist state would amply provide for each citizen,” Carlson writes, “and such support would free people from the impulse to hoard.”
Of course, our present is far more complex than what prior generations prophesied. Pockets remain associated with work and productivity, even as the nature of that work or what it means to be prepared for the day changes. The online community that gathers under the banner of Everyday Carry and the hashtag #pocketdump trades tips about the best pens, pry bars, multitools, or knives that all self-respecting people should have in their pocket. Enthusiasts watch one another dramatically emptying their pockets on live streams, assessing the efficiency and quality of what they’ve curated for that day’s carry. (Notably, a smartphone does not count.) I was looking at a Web site selling clothes marketed to devotees of “traditional western culture,” and happened upon a page advertising a flowery dress designed for “trad wives”—a reactionary subculture that believes women lived their best lives before the gains of feminism. The description gleefully notes that the dress has pockets, a suggestion that some forms of progress are too great to turn back.
Despite fluctuating fashion trends or archetypal silhouette shapes, we still need to carry things. One moment, it’s skinny jeans, which necessitated tote bags, fanny packs, or shoulder slings. The next, we’re being told to ditch our bags because of a return to baggy pants and big pockets. The vision of a future free from want and full of pocketless robes seems ever-distant. Instead, many of today’s avant-garde clothiers appear to be preoccupied with post-apocalyptic survival, echoing the Japanese designer and artist Kosuke Tsumura, whose nineteen-nineties “survival jackets” featured forty-four pockets capable of turning the disaster-ready garment into a wearable shelter. “Pockets evolved and continue to evolve as clothing and objects do,” Carlson writes. “Will we still require pockets in a future in which conductive thread can be woven into one’s sleeve and programmed to open locked doors, obviating the need for keys?”
Pockets have been a metaphor for abundance or perversion, possession or secrecy, a way of managing the efficiencies of life. They also index the changing imperatives of our existence, what we felt compelled to carry close to our bodies in different phases of our lives—cigarettes during one phase, a spare pacifier in another. They’re where we keep intimate things, like notes or keys, and where we lose things, too. They contain memories: a few dollars that survived multiple wash cycles, a receipt for something you bought years ago, some sand from a long-ago beach trip. Perhaps you’ve picked up a secondhand jacket or inherited a dress from a relative and come across a ticket stub or an old tube of lip balm: this is your heirloom now. In my closet there’s a prized jacket that belonged to a friend who died years ago. One of its many pockets contains an object I can’t make sense of: it appears to be a tiny, decorated awl. I take the thing out every now and then to study it, experiencing the intimacy of accessing another’s pockets, but I always put it back where it belongs. Was this a lucky trinket or did it serve some mundane purpose? I prefer the mystery of never knowing. ♦
An earlier version of this article misidentified the poet Howard Nemerov, and misquoted a line from his poem “Pockets.”
