At a young age, I found out it was just easier to buy men’s clothing. It saved me a lot of money, because many items were cheaper and lasted longer. Getting all the pockets I needed was just a bonus.
7 Likes
A few options have worked for me in the past to solve this and avoid carrying a purse. First, I would buy a man’s blazer and have it altered if necessary. It’s less work. A woman’s blazer with minimal/small pockets can be adjusted to fix that problem, too. However, the second option works best with a good quality garment. Lightweight fabric looks terrible with heavy items in pockets weighing it down.
7 Likes
This sounds like a 1st world problem. We should get our best team on it asap! (Said a man)
I absolutely cannot believe this hasn’t happened already. Apparently there is not even a single female-owned clothing company, or even one owned by a man who has a girlfriend or sister to tell him about the pocket issue?
2 Likes
A bigger problem I have with Levis (and most other women’s jeans too) is that in order to make the jeans super skinny, they’ve upped the lycra content in all jean styles so much that they’re hardly denim anymore. This makes them hotter in the summer and they wear out much faster. A touch of stretch is nice, but these days, all the jeans I can find are practically like leotards.
(I do know that there’s raw denim out there, but way I’m too cheap to pay for that ridiculous boondoggle)
3 Likes
Part of the problem is that many women refuse to buy utilitiarian clothing, because wearing sensible shoes and jeans that aren’t form-fitting has negative consequences for them socially or economically.
Tailors make what they think will sell.
EDIT: the clothes I wear to work are different from my preferred attire, and the clothes I wear in courtrooms even more so. But at least my stupid monkey suits have pockets!
4 Likes
At least if your purse was snatched, you would still have your pocket gun.
I’ve been with my wife when she was shopping for jeans, shorts, etc. That’s always her #1 complaint; the pockets are either fake, or far too shallow. I share in her annoyance, and I just don’t get why there aren’t options. They’ll make pants with four different stitching patterns on the ass to choose from, but if you want pockets that can hold more than a single tube of lipstick, fuck you.
I’m a bit surprised by the number of men in this thread minimizing this issue. Maybe the sample group of women I have experience with is skewed, but none of them have ever had anything neutral, much less good, to say about the pocket options in women’s clothing.
Telling them to wear men’s pants if they want pockets is missing the point by a mile. As is saying we have more important things to worry about these days.
How difficult is it to create a line of clothing that has decent sized pockets that aren’t cargo pants or cargo shorts?
Apparently incredibly difficult.
8 Likes
I knew this training video would come in handy some day!
Do people really walk up to each other in the US and ask about their respective equipment?
4 Likes
People are perfectly happy to discuss their phones or their handheld gaming systems or their cars or whatever and you wonder if they’ll just as happily discuss the merits of their guns?
2 Likes
They come with the legs to be shortened at your convenience, so there is some analogy…
1 Like
As someone from a country where the sort of people who want to tell you about their collection of guns are either:
a) the sort of person most people don’t get to have casual conversations with because the collection in question is Purdeys and Holland & Holland shotguns and the owners also own half of Scotland; or
b) strange people with ferrets down their trousers offering you scrumpy (don’t drink any! It’s for medicinal purposes only); or
c) even stranger people who really shouldn’t have a firearms licence (and may not have) who want to tell you all about how “they” are going to come for us all any time now…
the topic really doesn’t come up much.
I mean there are lots of perfectly normal people who have firearms here but they’re not likely to randomly wander up to you at social functions and start talking about their weaponry and speculating about your package.
That was more the bit I was enquiring about.
Do people really wander up to others and ask whether they’ve got a gun in their fanny pack?
It seems a really random thing to do.
As you say people discuss the merits of their phones but I’ve never seen anyone walk up to someone and say “Hey, I see you’ve got a mobile-shaped bulge in your pocket, is that the iphone 7? I’ve got the Nokia WingWang myself…”
1 Like
Oh absolutely they’re generally not going to make conversation about something in your pocket/pack/whatever but if they see your phone out they will make light conversation about it. Now personally I don’t live in a state where open carry is common but I’m sure guys down in Texas will do this sort of thing. As for concealed (in say a fanny pack), this I imagine is less common, but if you’re with a bunch of NRA folks, that’s just the sort of crowd that’ll suspect you’re concealed carrying and would willingly make it a light conversation topic. It really is a situation/location specific thing, but I don’t doubt it happens.
2 Likes
Our town had the opposite problem. A bunch of bored kids, all descended from homesteader refugees from the same area of Europe, staring at each others’ boring faces since kindergarten, hoping we’d get an exchange student from someplace really exotic…NOPE! We only got kids from places like Holland, West Germany, and maybe Norway. WTF? One exchange student even had the same last name as a big family in town.
The exchange students probably thought we weren’t very friendly because they were foreign. Nah, we were just really disappointed that they weren’t foreign enough.
1 Like
This complaint has been around since at least the thirties. There’s an old Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire musical called Roberta. In the movie, a football player inherits a Parisian couture house. To me, the best part of the movie is when everyone is out of the shop when a fashion editor comes by to get details of their new fall line. Fred Astaire, the fraternity brother of the new owner, starts listing his ideas of what women’s fashion should be like.
One of his ideas was for a woman’s evening gown “…with pockets all over it, so the man doesn’t have to carry her things in his pockets.” [paraphrased: I couldn’t find a clip for it]
I’ve been sewing the ‘Big Ticket’ items for myself since my 4-H years. All of my winter coats have multitudes of pockets - many sizes, many shapes, anywhere I want 'em. For those that flunked Home Ec, it’s pretty easy to add pockets to existing seams; and I’m sure any old tailor would do it for a reasonable price.
3 Likes
“Now, the chasing on this one is just magnificent… My great-great-granduncle shot the last Transylvanian Direwolf with this!”
3 Likes
OMG…you just quoted my dad…
1 Like
In this context of fanny packs, it’s pretty rare in the general population, sure… but my buddy Pedro the Cruel’s late father was a very big wheel in the local NRA, and sometimes the worlds collide. Lots of those guys can spot a concealed holster pretty quick.
True story: I went to the funeral reception and it was stuffed with former and current NRA leadership (but not Wayne LaPierre, who is apparently aware of the deceased’s opinion of him) and held in a suburban house stuffed with guns (and a shooting range in the basement) and without really thinking I parked my wife’s electric car with the Bernie and Hillary stickers where nobody could enter the building without seeing it. The NRA bigshots were too polite to say anything, but Pedro thought it was absolutely hilarious.
4 Likes
They’re probably cut-off men’s jeans. I had 30 years of versions of that, because I bought men’s Levi’s - made from sturdier fabric that aged well (at least back then), pockets that worked, and usually a couple of bucks less than the women’s model.
3 Likes
A brief history of the politics of pockets:
In the 19th century the skills of the Savile Row tailors devised a male suit that has remained standard for over 100 years, giving its owner 17 pockets in which to distribute all his keys, watch, notecase, money, matches, hanky etc without seriously altering his shape. If he had a good figure — wide shoulders, narrow hip — the suit preserved it while keeping all his knick-knacks within reach. It is typical of the perception of Thomas Carlyle (whose own rustic suitings were concealed beneath an elongated overcoat) that he noted the centrality of the suit, and especially of trousers, in his 1838 tract Sartor Resartus. To him, trousers and advanced culture — especially male culture — were inseparable. Trousers made possible pockets, to Carlyle a ‘marvellous natural invention’, part of the way civilisation ‘armed the body for the market-place’.
In fact trousers, let alone pockets in them, had primitive origins. They were the mark of the French peasants and workmen, the sans-culottes, who did not wear elaborate breeches or culottes, of fine wool, silk or satin, but what were later called dungarees or overalls. In the early 1790s, members of the Assemblée nationale adopted them. The fashion spread across the Channel when the advanced Whigs, led by Charles James Fox, adopted trousers. At this point the tailor stepped in, turning the rustic garment into elegant attire by making it of superfine cloth, shaping it to the leg, adding pockets, and putting an elastic band under the instep — a device which delighted smart cavalry regiments and, according to George Orwell in 1947, ‘gave you a feeling like nothing else on earth’. Beau Brummell was both architect and beneficiary of the ‘smart trousers’, which made male legs so alluring in ladies’ eyes that Pope Pius VII condemned them as sinful, and the garment was taboo in Rome until 1827. But everywhere else it flourished mightily.
If the tricoteuse had adopted trousers at the same time as the male sans-culottes, the history of the world might have been different. But the French revolution did nothing for women. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, kissed Westminster electors on behalf of Fox wearing voluminous and inconvenient skirts. Women did not even have the help of sensible underclothes. They wore petticoats, up to a dozen at a time. What were then called drawers, later knickers, were denied to all except prostitutes and dancers, who needed to show their legs. Drawers for respectable women did not begin to come in until about the time the papacy dropped its opposition to trousers.
If women were denied trousers, why could not they be given pockets? This question is discussed in an ingenious article in a recent issue of Victorian Studies. In ‘Form and Deformity: the Trouble with Victorian Pockets’, the American scholar C.T. Matthews discusses 19th-century writers who analysed fashions with a view to drawing social lessons. The record shows that the absence of pockets was a huge disadvantage to females and one reason why male superiority was so steadfastly maintained. James Robinson Planché’s Cyclopaedia of Costume (1879) called the adoption of trousers a sign of cultural triumph of ‘North over South, Protestant over Catholic, Angle over Celt’, and indeed, men over women. Six years later Isaac Walker, in Dress: As it Has Been, Is and Will Be, called ‘cylindrical clothes’ the ‘costume of civilised man’.
Women might have been given internal pockets but were denied them, too. It was argued that they had four external bulges already — two breasts and two hips — and a money pocket inside their dress would make an ungainly fifth.
The 20th century brought women, in theory, trousers and pockets. But a clothes industry run by men, and a fashion trade dominated by homosexuals, ensured this made little difference. Tight jeans will not accommodate useful pockets. I remember Christian Dior saying to me in 1954: ‘Men have pockets to keep things in, women for decoration.’ Handbags have become much more important in women’s appearance and practical life than they were in the 19th century, and relatively more expensive. Bigger, too. And in my observation, women spend a much greater proportion of their lives looking for mislaid objects than men do. It is true that women of genius overcome their disabilities. Margaret Thatcher made superb aggressive use of her handbag, for instance. I can still hear the sound of it snapping triumphantly. But few have her skills. Most are left, literally, out of pocket.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2011/06/the-power-of-a-pocket/
“Do women even use pockets?” This was a response I got the other day when chatting to a buyer in the fashion industry after I asked him: Why is it, in this day and age, that women’s clothing has mockets (fake pockets) instead of the real deal?
My question had come after an hours-long expedition to the mall one sunny Saturday afternoon to buy my wife and me suits.
I thought the fashion buyer’s response was a joke. But the conversation progressed rather disappointingly: “If there were pockets on women’s clothing, the prices would increase.” Untrue. Men’s clothing has pockets and most of their items are cheaper anyway. Even their T-shirts come with little chest pockets. For what? Storing their brilliant opinions about the fashion industry?
The non-existence of pockets on women’s clothing is sexist BS born in the 17th century. Pockets were for men, hidden little bags were for women - stitched on the inside of clothes, and only accessible when they were basically nude.
Then, of course, fashion changed. Male tailors decided women’s dresses should be more form fitting. No space for stitched sachets on the inside of their garments led to little tiny handbags, big enough only to store the crumbs of feminine opinion and maybe a hairpin or two.
You see, pockets are a thing of function. They free up the hands. Men needed their hands. They needed to work, shake hands, make deals.
…in certain parts of the 20th century, off men went to war and women stayed behind to work, work, work. Fix the stable door Cinderella, plough the field Cinderella, saddle the horse Cinderella. You know … that sort of thing.
But then, alas, men returned from war and decided women needed to be slim and be squeezed into slim clothing. Pockets were removed and replaced by statements such as this one by designer Christian Dior: “Men have pockets to keep things in, women for decoration.”
But like all things gender-biased, the lack of pockets or worse, mockets, on women’s clothing is just another form of oppression. Pocket politics is the sperm-infested love child of an inherently sexist industry that is driven by design and how fabric drapes over the female body so that it can make men’s objectification experience more pleasing.
8 Likes
