"It's Got Pockets!": Gender and Pocket Parity, an interview with Dr. Hannah Carlson

Dress, the history of fashion, is a production of dress media. With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Today, we all get dressed. Welcome to Trust, the history of fashion, a podcast where we explore the who-what-wing-of-why-we-weare. We are fashion historians and your hosts, Cassidy Zachary and April Callahan. Dress listeners, I'm not even a seasonal cold and the fact that I'm desperately fighting for you all to not lose my voice this week. Can stop us from bringing you another episode on what has to be our most requested topic of all time. You know, Cass, the show must go on and irony of the fact that while I was working on this episode the last few days, I did not have somewhere on my person to stash cough drops or a Kleenex. Well, this irony did not escape me. For a couple days in a row now, the outfits that I have happened to have been wearing did not have pockets. And this is of course a common frustration shared by millions of us who wear women's clothing today. Oh yeah, and not entirely a problem exclusive to modernity as we will find out in this episode. For centuries, garments gendered for women have proportionately had far less pockets than those intended for their male counterparts. And as the architect Bernard Rudolfski pointed out in the Museum of Modern Arts first ever exhibition to probe the topic of clothing and that was called our close modern. A dapper gent of his day in this was a 1947 between his pants, shirt, vest, coat and overcoat April might have a shocking total of 24 pockets at his disposal. That is amazing. Yeah, and also like, why have I been wandering around the last couple of days without even a single pocket? Why? And also why is it that when we do have pockets, this is actually a thrilling point of pride that when someone compliments you on your ensemble, you like gleefully point out, look, it has pockets. So true. Yeah, so all of these wise are the subject of today's episode. The topic of pockets is actually a question that we first started exploring in 2021. When we did a two part episode with Aryan Fennateau about her and Barbara Berman's book, The Pocket A Hidden History of Women's Lives 1660 to 1900. And that book focuses on tie-on pockets or these sort of bag-like detachable pockets that were worn beneath women's skirts for centuries. But today, we're actually going to turn our attention to the modern pocket as they are or are not built in and sewn into our clothes. Today, Dr. Hana Carlson joins us to discuss her recently released book pockets and intimate history of how we keep things close. Dr. Carlson is a professor of dress history and material culture at the Rhode Island School of Design or RISD. And we are so pleased to have her join us to unpack one of fashion histories, hot potato topics, the gender politics of pockets. Dr. Carlson, welcome to Dressed. Hana, thank you so much for joining us today. That's really great to be here. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. You've obviously been working on this book for some time. I'm going to guess that you have been sharing that fact with the people in your life. Probably some of the women in your life have given you lots of ooze and oz on this topic. So I bet it comes as no surprise to you that we receive a ton of listener requests to address this perceived gender disparity when it comes to the subject of pockets. And I want to quote something that you write in the introduction of the book you write, who has pockets and who had to get them is one of the concerns of this book. So no doubt you are about to make a whole lot of dress listeners very, very happy. The topic is too small to consider. It was women who were the most excited and the reason really to just keep going because as it turns out, there's a lot to say and and that support was really helpful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And your book covers quite the expansive time. It starts with the beginning of pockets. And so around the 1550s, and continues to the present. And yeah, next time I really want to do a book that's a very limited scope. Well, it's very impressive and super informative. But before we get into the details of the book itself, I'm hoping that you could tell us a little bit about your impetus in writing the book. And how you personally first came to this, permanently pressing problem for us women of pockets. Yeah, well, I was one of those occasions when I was temporarily stranded. It happened to be a fire drill, but any number of occasions, you know, if you ever locked yourself out of the house, out of the car, and you do that gesture where you pat yourself down. And I realized that that gesture says so much about our expectations for being dressed. And of course, women's wear so often falls down on the job. But I also at the same time happened to be teaching a class on Robinson Crusoe and Castaways in general. And I was struck by DeFos description of his castaway because he also doesn't have what he needs when he's first lands on that island. He has like a little pocket knife, some tobacco, a tobacco and a box. And there's this moment where he says, oh my god, this is it. I'm doomed. I don't have enough. But later on the next day, he sees his ship has found her in the distance. And he strips his clothes. He goes to the ship. He collects what he needs. He comes back, his pockets stuffed full of biscuits. So he has something to eat. And that moment was a huge joke in the 1720s. DeFos notorious blunder, the famous passage of his swimming to shore naked with his pocket school of biscuits. So that just visualized for me this notion that pockets for some people, for men, for men are so naturalized that you could strip your clothes at shore and still expect to have pockets that you're disposal. This notion that do your clothes after you when you really need it, when you really need them and that they don't for women, you know, was the impetus. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is quite the quirk of continuity, right? Or or discontinuity in the book. Absolutely. Yeah, right. It was as a blunder because he was, he forgot what he had done with his character. But to me, it was so revealing because it suggests something that's truthful about men and women's experience. Well, it's a perceived assumption, right? On the part of men that the pockets are just there always. So your book centers largely, but not entirely around inset pockets, but historically many other ways of pocketing personal items came before inset pockets. And it might come to some listeners, surprise that even within this very niche subject or pockets, pockets have their own fashion history. So how would you like to define a pocket and might you give us a little bit of a brief overview of the who went and where of pockets prior to the rise of the inset pocket. I mean, before pockets, everybody carries bags, of course. And so the bag is nearly universal across culture and for millennia. But, but in the history of dress, I think there are lots of temporary pockets. And so there are all sorts of ways in draped clothing. So if you distinguish tailored from draped in draped clothing, there are ways to make a pouch in terms of how you draped that cloth. So there are all sorts of ways to utilize temporary pockets that, for example, the Chuba robe, which is kind of a coat is belted around the waist and any excess fabric is pulled over the belt. And there you have this nice sort of opening of sort of a large pocket, same with the Roman toga. There was this sling shaped fold, and it was called the sinus, which in Latin poetry referred to a fold, a widening, a secret space. And it too was considered slightly dangerous. The late Roman Emperor Augustus insisted that that space be searched for weapons. So you can put stuff in your clothing before there are tailored pockets. So my definition was a tailored pocket is a permanently stitched fold, rather than these tailored pockets. When do we begin to see those permanently stitched pockets built into garments? And what sort of contacts were they first worn? So they show up about 1540, 1550, and we have know that why they come about as a mystery. Their first stitched into men's breaches, which were those puffy sort of bloomers that end at the knee. And no tailor explains why they began including pockets. It's almost. they seem. improvised, sort of as though a tailor said, "These bloomers are so big and puffy. Let me just take that bag you have belted at your waist and stuff it inside the breeches instead." And they look unfamiliar to us. Those early pockets hang from the waistband. They could be really big, like 20 inches. They could be native leather. They look like they're precursor, a small bag. And they go into men's breeches, really. I mean, there are some pockets that show up in women's clothes, but it seems as though women really stick to the medieval practice of carrying a bag under your skirt. So women continue to carry a bag which they wore tied to a belt. And that might be under the skirt or over the skirt in the 16th century, eventually in the 17th and 18th centuries, you get tie-on pockets, what Barbara Berman and Ann Fentzenot talk about in their great book, The Pocket. And of course, we have already done an episode with Ariane, so our listeners can tune back into that if they want to learn a little bit more about tie-on pockets. So these built-in pockets, these tailored pockets or in-set pockets are something new. And one thing as historians that we learn pretty quickly is that oftentimes something that's a novel or new innovations can breed anxiety. Technological advances are many times spark fear and even in the case of something as innocuous as fashion. In this specific case, these new fangled pockets in men's breeches were the subject of some controversy. So what sort of social anxieties do we see arise during the 16th century in terms of pockets they're wearing and their contents? Well, I think the surprising thing really the surprising thing to me was how much anxiety as you just suggested early pockets cause one of the most sensational objects that's carried in these early pockets are the first small scale pocket pistols. And so there's just a lot of worry into these new places, hit about a man's body, all sorts of high women and, you know, dastardly robbers could carry or stashed small scale weapons. And I think weapons had for so long been visible. So you carried your similar to had your dagger. This was the first time you had a weapon that might be concealed. Queen Elizabeth and her successor James, the first drafts several royal proclamations. They were worried about their nations being covered in blood because of these new concealed weapons. The first assassination of the political leader by handgun was also widely decried. And for a reason, I think that we're maybe unfamiliar with witnesses remarked that the killer the assassin paused as if to hand prince William of Orange a letter, but instead go out from this pocket a gun and and shaw him. So the attack was considered unmanly because it relied on this covert weapon. The guy was sort of unprepossessing, not very threatening looking. And he had pulled off this incredible assassination. So that worry was highlighted in this early 16th century commentary. Yeah. Well, it's almost like pockets held the promise of violence. I mean, and we don't really think of them like that today, but they're at their early origins that was part of their narrative. Well, I mean, there are times when we do think about that. I mean, we always say, I mean, when you, you know, any kind of encounter between law enforcement and a suspect, the expression, take your hands out of your pockets is all about, you know, are you armed? Is this threatening? So I think that notion carries through today, certainly. But they were also just secret. And that also made them, I think, different. This notion that you could carry about something private in public space marked the pocket as being really different from the purse. That I think was also of interest in this early, this early period. Yeah. Well, in this early period that we're speaking of in the 16th and into the 17th century, pockets were still largely gendered. So how did or built in pockets, tailored pockets? How did pockets evolve alongside the three-piece suit, which is also evolving at this period over the next few centuries? You know, you write in the book, you write quote, "The suit came to more closely resemble a cupboard or a bureau with separate drawers, even locked or trick drawers than a simple cloth covering." So how so in terms of the suit? I mean, I think the pocket proliferates, the motion of those truncos all the way through the suit, so you might have it from the tip of your tails to the interior breast and it seems like they, this is just the pocket has just colonized the suit and they're all these surfaces and you could organize those places. So it's almost as though pockets or the suit becomes this portable storehouse. It allows you to carry everything you might need in public to move through the world. And all sorts of objects are now miniaturized for the pocket. You know, they're much less contentious than the pocket pistol, but you can have that allow you to keep time figure out where you are with a compass, record your observations with many little tablets, notepads, books or miniaturized so that you can carry what you need, the information that you need on your person. There's a wonderful 1644 Bible that's the soldier's pocket Bible. It's there so that you can't read a whole Bible, but you might be in dire straits and need the words of God and here it is, right? You can carry it right at your chest, all sorts of vice, you know, objects that allow you to, you know, carry around at the hall or, you know, snuff is made into, you know, beautiful jeweled boxes that allow you to carry that stuff. You have your ear pick and an anchor chip and comb also all miniaturized, but there's always artifacts that allows go getting modern man to move around. Yeah, yeah. It's so fascinating. I love, Cassidy is a little bit obsessed with miniatures, but just the wide variety of things that have been miniaturized during these time periods to fit in the pocket specifically. I mean, it was very hip, right? Like these are very hip objects to own at the time. Men have beautiful snuff boxes and I think they do have all the writing toolkits and the way in which the miniature is put into these beautiful boxes and distributed and the fact that you could take it out and use it was almost half of the fun of owning it, but you could have it in your pocket and then display it sort of as you view it, I think, is what made me think so attractive and interesting. And I think, you know, men and women both carry artifacts in common, but I do think that, as you know, of the pocket, a lot of women's objects are like housewives, which was a little miniature artifact that carried all you would need for your sewing projects. And so expectation that you would be able to work at any moment and never have your hands still was something that was an expectation. But, you know, there's objects just as idiot and critic as that of men that women carried. There was a wonderful revolutionary war diary in which a woman talked about her array and her mother's tie pockets are stolen and in those tie on pockets are just a few baby's caps that she had made for her children long ago. And so clearly the sentimental objects that you carry would be unexpected and idiotic. Yeah, yeah. Well, and also too, like this gender divide on the subject of pockets also extends to kind of like issues of morality, right, in terms of some contents which were deemed appropriate for each sex to carry. You write in the book, for instance, that a young girl was, quote, "expected to have on hand things that allowed them to do good works." Was the same expectation placed on young boys her same age? I don't think so. I mean, the object that is most prized is the pocket knife. And so certainly in the 19th century, you see tales of rambunctious boys like Tom Sawyer. And the thing they want most is this pocket knife. And it's not discussed as a dangerous object. Any entity pocket knife could be dangerous as downplay because it allows boys to be adventurous. And that was sort of the goal of the 19th century to make sure that we didn't totally lose that world know-how as the US, for example, as industrializing. And I think that's why it's sentimentalized that objects that allowed you to kind of, if you had to skin a squirrel on your own and bring it home for dinner, you can still do that. And the most girls carry most are thimbles. So again, sewing objects for sewing objects for doing work. Objects of domesticity versus objects of exploration. One could argue, right? You say it very well. Yes. And also, it goes without saying that one of the pocket's functions is to keep one's possessions safe. What of this issue of not only safety and security, but also the private nature of both men's and women's pockets at this time? And was that privacy viewed differently between the genders? I think you would have to say that privacy is kind of a privilege, actually. And the secure pocket certainly, you could keep what you needed at any secrets safe and near your person. The danger of time pockets, as well as purses, is that they can be misplaced. They can be stolen. It's much harder. to keep whole of them. And I think it's interesting to see all of the misogyny and sort of sexist discussion around women's purses and pockets, you know, from the just during this whole period. And it seems almost as though there's this anxiety about women having access to what they need. And the private space could be threatening. There were discussions, for example, of the first bloomers, and one tailor is interviewed in the New York Times saying, you know, we don't know what they're holding in those pockets. It's not only suffrage tracks, maybe even pocket pistols. And I think this notion that these functional spaces might be threatening, threatening private space is something that clearly shows up in the evidence that I've seen. It's almost as if the early tailored built-in in-set pockets for women were viewed as radical, even though the fact that men had been wearing them much in that same function for centuries prior. Yes, pockets could be seen as radical because they are objects that allow you to move through the world with effortlessly. If the question is to make sure that women stay in a domestic sphere, pockets, pockets doothfed and patriarchal assumptions. Pocket equals agency. We're going to take a brief sponsor break here, but when we come back, we're going to chat about the pocket as performance. Welcome back, dress listeners. Hannah, I loved your chapter about two items that are most commonly stowed in the pockets. And that's hands. You wrote an entire chapter about hands and pockets. And, you know, for centuries, the question of whether to place one's hands in their pockets or not was the matter of some consternation. There was like whole moral discussions that were surrounding this debate. So what was all the fuss about about hands and pockets? It's all about pockets placement. Pockets are dark spaces over and around orrogenous zones and placing the hand inside the pocket was something that really upset all sorts of moralists and mothers and educators so much so that in the 19th century, mothers and educators were lamprooned for sewing up boys' pockets so that they couldn't, they couldn't make that gesture. I think it was fascinating to me to think that gesture usually requires hands to be in motion. And yet we need someone putting their hands in their pocket as somehow communicative. It is a gesture that the fashion press and fashion history has depended on. And so to look cool is part of the project of fashion. And it's I think revealing that fashion photography depends on an attitude that was once considered rude, but still has a sort of element of sexual freestyle. It still looks sexy and it also looks aloof. And it looks aloof because we reach the gesture not only through the eyes of etiquette but also through the eyes of oratory. And I think you remove your hands, you're justing metaphorically something about your engagement, something about the fact that you're disengaged. They have an emotional inaccessibility. And that sort of jostling between sexuality and inaccessibility results in the ultimate cool. And I feel like that's why it was cool in the 17th century when the courteers did it and it's cool today. And it has not stopped being cool. I think in the book you use what I felt like was the perfect word. And it is a French word, but it's also also some insoles, which is I don't know, I'm trying to think of like how I would translate that into English, but it is that kind of like detached coolness. Yeah, absolutely. And there's some gestures that don't have don't speak to us anymore. The other place people put their hands was in their under their coat at the suit. They have not only in Bonaparte and that that derives from 18th century gentlemen trying to look distinguished and reserved. We don't do that today, but the hands and pockets still calls to us. So what point that we haven't made entirely explicit here yet, Hana, is at what point do we start to begin to see in set pockets or built in pockets appear in women's garments? Around the turn of the 19th century around 1800 when empire dress is so high-waisted and narrow comes into fashion and women's previously tie-on pockets move out and you have the first fashion handex. You said that point that pockets, women's pockets come and go. Sometimes they're in set, sometimes they're not. Under the voluminous skirt of the 1860s, I saw in set pockets and intriguingly some of those early 1860s pockets for women have the exact same shape as the tie-on pocket. The first in set pockets for women look very much like a tie-on pocket would look. But when fashion gets narrow, the pockets seem to just come and go. And so there's some really funny commentary about some of these early in set pockets. For example, by the 1880s, the bulk of the skirt gets pushed back into a huge bustle and their commentators, for example, on Harper's Bazaar in the 1880s, lamenting the fact that they can't reach this pocket. That is inaccessible that she's one woman writes, one correspondent, that she's trying to get on a public transportation and she's everybody's in line really getting upset with her because she can't reach the coins to get on the bust. And she says, "How can I reach them? My pocket is in South Boston." And so, you know, I think dressmakers were valiantly trying to get a pocket in there, but it didn't actually fit. And of course, yeah, all the volume had transferred to the rear of the ensemble, so she couldn't quite reach around to reach her pocket. Exactly. So women call them inaccessible when they are available. They're not dependable. They're not in the same place. Yeah, well, dependable pockets available pockets is something that women have been craving for centuries. By the turn of the 20th century, women wanted in on this pocket game too desperately and they wanted them to be accessible. They wanted them to be practical. They wanted them to be useful. And you write about some very real connections between the suffrage movement, dress reform, and women's campaigns for built-in pockets of their own. And I really loved this quote from the San Francisco Chronicle that you include in the book. This is from 1913. And the newspaper was writing about how suffrage just were quote, "now dragging the pockets into the female emancipation problem." So I mean, I don't know how you can get more explicit about this connection between politics and fashion and specifically the pocket in this one line. Would you like to speak a little bit more about this? Yes, I would love to. I mean, I think we think that the recent social media upset expressions of, you know, all the memes and jokes and hashtags in the pockets or give me death that that's recent. Yeah, yeah. And it's not recent at all. Women very clearly during that early women's rights movement and the suffrage movement pointed out that the material world has implications for politics. Women advocate for pockets because it's clear that as towed and when the willow says, "without pockets, you are not equipped for the real contest." I think when we think about the dress reform, a lot of it centers on the corset and on the big skirts. But it was interesting and surprising to see that pockets were clearly part of that conversation. The women's rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton published several articles about the lack of pockets. She was incensed that men could drape down the street free as a lark while she was holding her skirt and parasol and purse. And then she published this really funny deliberation she had with her dressmaker. Her dressmaker refuses to serve the pocket. Her dressmaker says, "A pocket would bulge you out. Just would bulge you out all over." And Stanton says, "I need it." And the dressmaker refuses to make it and you see these ideas of femininity and the ideas of showing off the body are so strong that even that dressmaker want refused to add what her client wanted. But let's not forget here too because we've also done episodes on bloomer dress and dress reform. So you can tune back into those if you're interested. But that silhouette still had a ton of volume in it. Like it could be argued that that same volume that was in dress reform dress in those moments were women were wearing the slightly shorter skirts with the bloomers underneath. It was pretty much the same kind of width that men were wearing when they first started wearing inset pockets in their own bloomers in the 16th century. So it's fascinating to me that that her dress maker was simply like, you cannot have this. It's going to bulk you up too much because, you know, to our modern day eyes today, even though they were shorter skirts, they were still quite wide. It really just suggests how much traditional ideas and notions of gender just trumped what could have been innovative design thinking. Well, we do start to see some innovative design thinking in the 19 teens. Women's demands for pockets were met to some degree by fashion during World War One. And a lot of that fashion of that era starts to kind of look towards military uniforms as inspiration. And in the hands of some of these fashion designers, this this matter of pockets became at time a matter of priorities, right? Should they be practical? Should they be decorative? Should they be functional? Should they be fantasy? Can they be both? And for some designers, they were. And you do, once we like start to dip into the 20th century, talk about some of the very specific designers who have navigated these waters of the pocket. I'm hoping that you might speak a little bit about how some of the biggest names in fashion have conceptualized the role of pockets in the first half of the 20th century or so. For American women's sportswear designers, certainly the pocket was just this exciting place to experiment. And Claire McCartle and Bonnie Cashin, for example, who are trying to make practical ready to wear for the woman on the go explicitly include really big pockets. Pockets that sometimes look to women's wear. So interesting to me was that these designers didn't look at the military, for example, to make sort of a big say cargo pocket in her 1942 pop over Claire McCartle has this one off center big quilted pocket that's a patch pocket on her wrap around dress. And that patch pocket looks a bit like an apron pocket, but here she's repurposed it to make a chic, lovely dress that was supposed to not be as doubty as the house dress. And that pocket was quilted so you could stuff anything in it and it wouldn't be bulky. All purpose pocket. The original version of the popover came with a oven mitt. Exactly. That was attached. You could leave it attached or you could take it off, but also a lot of women wore those as a like a gardening cover up as well. So you could like tuck your little gardening tools into your into that little pocket on the front too. Absolutely. And so I think the same sort of playful experimentation is going on with Bonnie Cashin who makes a pocket, one of her big selling designs was the purse pocket and it looks like a coin purse pocket and she would place it you know right at the hip and which was a great place to put it. We fashion has traditionally relied on using a big skirt to make the waist looks smaller and here you could have a functional pocket that again relates decoratively to another object of purse coin purse, but it's fashionable as well. Some pockets were less expressive so Chanel was really interested in having you know an anti-decorative sort of uniform when we think of the Chanel suit. And those pockets that you know often too over two reference I think, masculine suiting, they weren't very capacious. You couldn't really put all that much in them, but they were always there and they worked and she was insistent that she wanted to place pockets accurately for use and she could not stand for example her contemporary GR whose pockets might just be there because they accentuated the hip or the shoulder and were fun and decorative. She was infuriated by pockets that might be placed simply for decoration and of course GR famously says man have pockets to keep things in women for decoration and then there are all sorts of Elsa's cap rally just has a field day with pockets she makes pockets shape like women's lips like bureau drawers she uses I think pockets to think about their metaphoric resonance as these secret hidden places and boy she just plays and plays with pockets and they were I think often very useful as well. So a whole range of designers once they appear in women's wear in the modern era take up the pocket as this new decorative element and whether they make them also functional or not becomes a question for later designer. I love the fact and it will come as no surprise to our regular listeners of the show that if I had to pick one fashion designer that's my favorite would be scaper rally but you point out that in many of her garments it was almost like a guessing game as to which of the pockets are functional and which of them are not. So it's almost like this little playful twist that she's playing with the wearer of her garments as well not just the viewer and I think that's like really really fascinating and so emblematic of scap. Yeah and because that that garment in particular is the bureau drawer suit where she has pockets seemed to look like bureau drawers and of course she's making this joke because what's the chest of drawers and here she puts a chest of drawers over your suit but some of those pockets for perfume pockets and some of them weren't and so only the wearer as you mentioned would know which pocket is useful and which pocket is just decorative. Well you know for some of these designers the functionality of the pocket pandered to design and for others it was the reverse of that like the design pandered to the functionality so I'm hoping that we can get into this a little bit more in detail in the book you talk about two kind of recent-ish studies within the last five years or so that I'm hoping that you would like to speak about the first one has to do with the size of pockets in gendered jeans and the other one was more of an experiment wherein a female editor put her male colleagues in pocketless pants. What did both of these studies reveal about the expectations that we put on our clothes or conversely that our clothes put on us? Well the the first study is by Jandy and Amber Thomas and they're writing for their journal the pudding and this was a 2018 study and they looked at 80 pairs of jeans and they were looking at the front pockets and they did this incredible graphic that you can take a look at online where they ask well what objects actually fit in pockets? Can your phone, can your wallet, can the pen, can your hand? And they determined that in these 80 pairs of jeans women's are 48% shorter and in fact sometimes your hand can only fit up to your knuckle and they certainly never carry a phone and I think reveal just how much women's fashion is so tied to aesthetics or this notion that that fashion doesn't have to meet you halfway, doesn't have to be useful to sell it to you and here they have they have some great numbers. Yeah and I don't think that's the same expectation for men, right? They demand the utility in many many many cases. It is part of doing business in menswear. You would be wrapped down if you didn't have a useful pocket and it's just not even a question I think is the is the real difference? It's just was standardized so early with the suit and it never never don't consider adding a pocket and I think because in part women's came so much later if there's just always a question. That really leads us into the second study that I was hoping that you can talk about. So in 2017 a Buzzfeed editor said all right I've had it. I'm going to ask for volunteers in my office I'm going to sell your pockets shut and I'm going to see what what it's like for you and so she records their experiences over the course of the day and the volunteers they can't keep track of their work badges they get stuck that locked out of the office they don't know where to how to hold their wallet when they're getting take out for lunch at the urinal one guy can't figure out where to put his phone and they're just so frustrated and so it's this wonderful thought experiment you know if the roles are reversed how would it feel and one guy says it's like knowing electricity had been invented yet being forced to live in the dark. I actually think that this experiment is not the first time this has been done there were like in the 1890-1900 there were a couple women who write about what would it be like if men didn't have their pockets and they run through this same thought experiment so I think it's clearly the jealousy that women have had expressed in these well let me show you what it's like kind of kind of dirt yeah I think for a lot of people it might be like this natural thought progression that perhaps women's handbag industry has something to do with this that the handbag industry has a vested interest in keeping women's pockets more decorative than functional and you know I am certainly not going to deny the fact that handbags are a big big big business but this discussion as you start the book with of who has pockets and who had to get them. then is now centuries old at this point. So, like, that question was always there from the very beginning. So, it's a history that's far older than the rise of the designer handbag. So, Hannah, I'm curious, like, what is it? Why is it that those of us who wear women's clothing are still fighting to this day for pocket parity? - I think you put it really well. I do think that's such a great point that the handbag industry is recent, but this division precedes it. And also, I don't quite wanna say that it's too simple and too easy to blame one industry. I think that it's more, it's deeper than that. And I think this notion that men's clothes are for utility and women's for beauty is just deep. And it relates to how we understand gendered social roles and that that is far more tenacious than, and goes back further as you suggest, than the handbag industry. I think the reason that we don't yet have pocket parity is just multifaceted. Part of it is social, part of it is about production. Part of it is, we've done this. This has worked for us this long. Women have bags and that sort of expectation. But I also think it's really about this notion that men's clothes still are for utility and women's for beauty that has really stuck with us. And so that that impetus is in there. If you walk into a children's department today, any major brand, and you move from the girls section to the boys section, it's really clear and obvious. The girls clothes are sparkly, the shorts are short, and there are very few working pockets. And I feel as though we are training girls to expect inconvenience and sort of really retrograde notion of gender and show up early. And that's where we haven't disturbed this. Even though there's been all this club up recently, that kind of change hasn't really occurred. We want pockets, still remains the theme of the day. Everyone wants pockets. Hanna, thank you so much for joining us under us. This was a delight. This is going to make a lot of people very happy that we got to further their own questions about why women's garments may not have pockets as frequently. I'm not sure if we came to any clear cut answer, but that's okay, right? We did not come to a clear cut answer, but I hope it was fun. I know I certainly had a great time talking to you April. Yes, and we've only covered just a handful of the themes that are covered in your much broader exploration of the history of tailored inset pockets that covers 500 years in the book. So this was just a little bit of snippet. And for those of you who want to learn a little bit more, grab Hanna's really amazing book. Thank you so much. - Thank you. - Hanna, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your more than 500 year exploration of the history of pockets. And dress listers, you can get your own copy of Dr. Carlson's book via our dressed bookshelf. Head on over to bookshop.org/shop/dressed, which is where we have more than 100 of our favorite fashion history books organized just for you, many of which have, of course, been featured on the show. Bookshop.org is a very cool Brooklyn based organization which works with independent booksellers exclusively. So when you shop our bookshelf, you're not supporting Mr. Bezos, but rather small book retailers across the country, as well as two of your favorite podcasters. So head on over to check that out and that's bookshop.org/shop/dressed. - Also, I would like to make sure that we also plug something that didn't quite make it in today's episode, but this is actually something that Hanna and I did chat about a bit when we were speaking. And that is this other website, which is dresseswithpockets.com. And this is fascinating. This was launched in 2019 by Jim Sabo. And the site itself is sort of an aggregator and it calls together thousands of women's work garments, which feature pockets that are available online for sale. And it links out to the individual brands websites where you can purchase these items. They take a small commission from the brands to list it on their site, but all that detective work about finding dresses and jumpsuits and other really amazing things that have pockets, all of this work has already been done for you. And as Sabo says, the website, quote, is giving you 10,000 chances to say it's got pockets. - That's awesome. - Yeah. And I love really kind of cool, interesting side note here is that Sabo has noted that many of his repeat customers are trans women who grew accustomed to pockets being a given in menswear, but now expect no less after their transition. So this makes perfect sense. And Sabo also says that his entire goal with this website is to ultimately make it irrelevant when we reach the point of pockets for one and for all. - And this site has an entire page already devoted to sustainable brands, which we love. So you can shop for pockets with ease and also do it ethically. Pockets sustainability. Two of the things we love most on dress. As we love our listeners and thank you because that does it for us this week, may you consider where the hot pockets reside in your wardrobe next time you get dressed. Remember, we love hearing from you. So if you'd like to write to us, you can do so via email at helloaddresstistry.com. You can also DM us on Instagram, @dress_podcast, which is where we post images to accompany each week's episode. And if you'd like to search for the Instagram content connected to this specific episode, you can check out the hashtag #dress320. That's dressed 320. Did you know that you can now listen to dress ad free for just $3 a month? Ditch the ads. Check out the show notes or our link tree in Instagram for the link to subscribe to our exclusive content, which is the ad free version of dress. This will appear in your feed just like normal and your support is always appreciated. More dressed coming away on Thursday. Dress, the history of fashion, is a production of dress media.