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SPEAKER_09: I had never worn a dress before. I'm sure it was like slightly graceless as like all the things I did at the time seemed to have been. I met peers on our very first week in college.
SPEAKER_02: It must have been day one or two. It was really early.
SPEAKER_09: We went to a super PC liberal arts school and so our freshman mixer was a cross-dressing dance, which is such an outdated term now, but whatever. That's what it was called.
SPEAKER_02: I think all they told us was you should wear clothes of the opposite gender. They probably said it in a way that's slightly more, you know, literate in the differences between gender and biological sex than what I just said.
SPEAKER_09: It was a strange way to make first impressions on each other. Not because we were scared of wearing dresses or backwards baseball caps or whatever we wore that night.
SPEAKER_02: It was because for many of us, we had to borrow clothes from the other people in our hall. It was weirdly intimate. Piers and I, complete strangers, swapped outfits. You're tall and I'm tall and I think that you're probably the only person in the hall, if not the building, whose clothes would have fit me.
SPEAKER_09: I remember I loaned Piers a pink swirly patterned mini dress from the 60s that I had bought from a thrift store and I had no idea if he would take care of it or even return it.
SPEAKER_02: But Piers tried it on. It looked great. And he went to check himself out in the bathroom down the hall. And here's what happened next. I immediately locked myself out of my room. I was like, oh, no, my keys are in my room because I didn't have anywhere to put them. The dress had no pockets.
SPEAKER_02: Piers's brand new roommate let him back in, but then he went to sleep. So Piers wanted to make sure he didn't make that mistake again. He couldn't lose his keys at the party. We all ended up in the big dance hall where there's really loud music and it was like unbearably hot.
SPEAKER_09: All the ladies' eyebrow pencil mustaches were running onto their teeth with sweat and things like that. And I believe I just clutched my keys in my hand and thought about it really hard all night, which sounds crazy. articles of interest, a show about what we wear. And so maybe the ideas about clothing can attach ideas about class, an idea of home to a piece of cloth.
SPEAKER_00: People can wear clothes, but if you ain't got the attitude and style to carry it off, man, you're just a clothes force.
SPEAKER_02: Women's wear is littered with fake pockets that don't open or shallow pockets that could hardly hold a paperclip. If there are pockets at all, they are just smaller and they fit less than men's pockets do. And you don't have to take my word for it. Here we are going to the police supply store. I wanted to find an example of a uniform that had pockets and compare those made for men and those for women. This is the shop that provides the uniforms for the Oakland police. And when I asked the store manager if I could look at the men's and women's uniforms, this is what he told me. Are you ready for this?
SPEAKER_07: I'm ready for this.
SPEAKER_02: The women wear the men's.
SPEAKER_07: Really? Because the pockets are too small on the women's.
SPEAKER_02: Wait, really? That's why? That is why. But there is a women's that they make.
SPEAKER_07: But I don't carry them. Well, I've got some over here. But traditionally, they use the men's because the pockets are bigger and they can put things in them. Where the women's are smaller, which I can show you, and they won't fit.
SPEAKER_02: Yes! That's fascinating! Now you have something to blog about. I'll give you something to blog about.
SPEAKER_02: Man's great evolutionary advantage is the creation of tools. The problem is we're not marsupials. We need to carry them somehow. And this idea of who has access to the tools they need, who can walk through the world comfortably and securely, this is what we are talking about when we talk about pockets.
SPEAKER_11: Pockets speak to this question of preparedness and your ability to move in public and to be confident. It's really difficult to get around if you don't have what you need. And it's about, I think, mobility and movement in public. Hannah Carlson lectures at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she teaches classes in material culture, fashion history, and fashion theory.
SPEAKER_02: And she is working on a book about pockets. If the formal question for me is, what difference does it make? What's the difference between a pocket and a bag?
SPEAKER_11: And I think the key difference is that the pocket is internal and it's secret.
SPEAKER_02: A bag can be stolen. A bag can be lost. And then, that's it. You don't have your things anymore. With the pocket inside, you don't have to think about it. You forget about it. But you still have stuff in there.
SPEAKER_11: It is seen as this territory of your own that connects you to the objects you carry. Those objects become part of you. Case in point, Thomas Jefferson.
SPEAKER_02: Jefferson was called a walking calculator for all of the miniature tools and devices he carried.
SPEAKER_11: Miniature scales, drawing instruments, a thermometer, a surveying compass, a level, a globe. And he was able to jot down his observations from his daily wanderings.
SPEAKER_02: Historically, men have been the ones with these tools for public life on their person at all times. In Hannah Carlson's research, she found a lot of accounts of women complaining about this. One woman noted that her son was better equipped than she or her daughter.
SPEAKER_11: And she concludes that a boy's pockets are his certificate of empire. All through life, he will carry the scepter of dominion by the right of his pockets. I mean, so this is great language I loved. I mean, it's playful, it's funny, but there's some seriousness here about what later costume historians call real social handicap. Pockets are just a perfect metaphor for privilege. Not only because they are so easily taken for granted by the people who have them, but also because like the categories of race and gender themselves, pocket disparity is a construct.
SPEAKER_02: It's made up. There's no reason for women's pockets to be so small. Back in the 18th century, women's pockets were quite large. You could hold quite a lot of them. There are accounts of women putting food in it to eat later. They would have writing tools, maybe a small diary, sewing implements. They could carry quite a lot, especially if you had two.
SPEAKER_10: This is Clarissa Esguerra.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, I'm Clarissa Esguerra. I am the Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
SPEAKER_10: And where are we now? We are in a storage area at the museum for our department. And so we have everything laid out on a table, currently covered with tissue, but I will reveal them one at a time. This is a little hard to picture on the radio, but indulge me for a second. Pockets used to be a completely separate garment. They were really more like pouches.
SPEAKER_02: Pockets being suspended from the waist has a really long history, actually. It started for both men and women in the medieval era. They were suspended from their waist over their clothes.
SPEAKER_10: And then sometime in the late 17th century, men started having clothes made where pockets were incorporated. They were in their coats, their waistcoats and in their breeches. And women's pockets remained separate from the rest of clothing.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, kind of like a fanny pack. No, no, no, no. I think, um, okay, think of the pockets on the inside of your jeans, right? Those teardrop shaped pouches. They were kind of like that, but they were just on their own, like separate from pants, and they were attached to a string. And these would be tied around the waist. Yes. And in some cases, these pouches are really big, like the length of your forearm. And these detachable pockets were then worn under women's dresses. So even though a lot of old dresses look like they have pockets, they really just have cut slits in them.
SPEAKER_10: Women had slits made in the petticoats and dresses, and they could access their pockets by going through those slits. You could reach through your dress to get to your detachable pocket pouches. Does that make sense? Sure, why not?
SPEAKER_02: Would you like to see them?
SPEAKER_10: Yes. Okay. So I thought we would kind of start with the more simpler ones and then kind of go into the more complicated ones, because they were really functional, but also they were an opportunity for splendor. I'm actually just going to cut to the complicated expensive fancy pockets, because they are indeed very splendid.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_10: So these were very, very finely embroidered. This one is a silk pocket, and it's lightly quilted, and then it is covered with this beautiful floral chain stitch embroidery. So these are all tiny, tiny little chain stitches. Oh, my God. It's really fine, and there's a pair of them that match. And this is something that she just wore, and only she and the woman who helped her get dressed, and perhaps her lover saw. Pockets were almost like lingerie, especially the beautiful expensive ones. The pockets were this intimate thing close to the body, holding your most precious items safe under the layers of your ginormous fluffy dress.
SPEAKER_02: And then came the French Revolution. The French Revolution happened.
SPEAKER_10: Which, in many ways, was a revolution against excess.
SPEAKER_02: These dresses that were made with voluminous silk skirts were no longer fashionable, and what was fashionable were muslin dresses that clung to the body.
SPEAKER_11: So when you get to the 1800s and that empire style where the waist is pretty much gone, you know, think of Jane Austen movies. You have the columnar silhouette. A silhouette like a straight Greek column. And some of these columnar dresses have slits for pockets, but a lot of them are too body-hugging to accommodate extra bulge.
SPEAKER_02: There's no space for pockets, and so suddenly women begin to carry little purses. And there's lots of ridicule about women having to lose their pockets and having to carry these silly bags.
SPEAKER_11: And at the time, they called them reticules because they were so small.
SPEAKER_10: Like ridiculous? Like ridiculous. Reticules were teeny, teeny, tiny little drawstring pouches, elaborately beaded and decorated.
SPEAKER_02: They held maybe a few coins and some keys, but like, that's it. And you could hang the loops of the drawstring around your wrist, which was another reason why it was considered ridiculous. You have to remember to carry it. It's easy to lose. People can steal it. That's the formal difference.
SPEAKER_02: But that's kind of the price you pay for a fashion. The little bags were in style. And I mean, you can see why. If you look at them, they're beautiful. They're very fancy, beautiful things, shell-shaped or made of silk and gorgeous things.
SPEAKER_04: They're to be seen. They're not particularly capacious. This is dress historian Barbara Berman.
SPEAKER_02: The reticule becomes a kind of temporary fashionista thing, and so you get journalists writing in the first and second decades of the 19th century about pocketists and anti-pocketists.
SPEAKER_02: The fashion press made pockets seem like they were for housewives, for women who needed to lug around sewing kits and bits of food they were saving for later. The anti-pocketists were going out dancing and gambling. They have these beautiful little reticules and they're much more fashionable.
SPEAKER_04: They don't need to carry keys and Bibles and stacks of pins or all these useful things in their pockets because they don't have that kind of life. They're much more out and about. And so you have the pocketist, anti-pocketist debate strung along to gain readership, I suppose.
SPEAKER_02: In the 19th century, fashion magazines were saying it was a liberating thing for women not to have pockets, to be free from tasks. Reticules, which hardly held anything, were kind of like long nails that don't let you use your hands as much or stiletto heels that don't let you walk as far. There's that luxury in not moving too much or doing too much and just looking really good. And it's always been an ongoing debate if that is empowering or not. But it's not like the reticule completely killed the tie-on pocket. They were still around.
SPEAKER_04: A woman could perfectly well have a pair of pockets and also a reticule for when she wanted to be a show-er. They co-exist and this kind of pocket clearly outlives the reticule. You find them in use in the 17th century going right through to the 20th century.
SPEAKER_02: So why don't we have these anymore if it wasn't the Columbus silhouette? Search me. If you can come up with a good answer.
SPEAKER_04: It's very difficult to pinpoint it. They fade from use, they become old-fashioned. More dresses start to have integrated pockets, but they're often very small. Not always, but they are often very small and very difficult to access. The women's wear that had integrated pockets tended to be feminized versions of men's wear.
SPEAKER_02: Made by men. They're made by tailors, not dressmakers.
SPEAKER_04: And out of habits, the tailors would be putting in proper fitted-in pockets, so to speak, like men's pockets. So they're because we're using male tailoring techniques. Basically, if an outfit had an inset pocket, it was a uselessly proportioned version of a man's pattern.
SPEAKER_02: The pocket is seen to be a monopoly of the male sex eventually.
SPEAKER_11: As pockets and trousers are won, and as women's fashions change, pockets can be lost. And as men's fashions change, pockets can be gained. And they were.
SPEAKER_02: Again and again and again, pockets were getting added and added and added over the course of decades. And by the early 20th century, it was just getting ridiculous. Copious amounts of pockets. I can't even, like, you have your ticket pocket for the train,
SPEAKER_10: you have your coin pocket, watch pocket, breast pocket. Then you have all the pockets in your waistcoat and then in your trousers. It's really interesting, and women have one purse. Both gendered extremes were starting to get terrible.
SPEAKER_02: Because pockets had proliferated, they had become completely worthless.
SPEAKER_11: You couldn't find anything. You stop on the street, you have to pat yourself down to remember where you've left your wallet. The average man of 1944 had 24 pockets. Way too many. At least according to Bernard Rudolfsky.
SPEAKER_02: He was kind of enraged by the way that pockets kept sort of popping up.
SPEAKER_11: Bernard Rudolfsky was an architect. A modernist architect.
SPEAKER_02: And modernists were really into sleek, simple buildings that were absolutely functional with no excess. He was this modernist who wanted to make clothing perfectly rational.
SPEAKER_11: And he found it ironic that all his fellow rational modernist architects were all wearing suits.
SPEAKER_02: He wanted to, I think, shake up this confidence that we have about the suit and suggest, no, no, it is not modern in any way.
SPEAKER_11: It has all sorts of old ideas and beliefs. And this pocket that was once functional is now no longer functional because we have so many. And to prove his point, God love him, Rudolfsky puts on an exhibit at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1944.
SPEAKER_02: And it was called, Are Clothes Modern? Question mark. Are clothes modern was the question.
SPEAKER_11: Pssst, the answer was no.
SPEAKER_02: The central piece in Rudolfsky's MoMA exhibit was this big, multi-layered infographic chart. It looked like an x-ray of a man's three-piece suit. We have color-coded the pockets in his shirt, in his vest, in his coat, and overcoat.
SPEAKER_11: And you see this wonderful sort of chaotic overlay of 24 pockets.
SPEAKER_02: The average suit had 24 pockets and 70 buttons. Rudolfsky was really passionate about how completely silly and redundant this was.
SPEAKER_11: The guy is a wonderful nutball.
SPEAKER_02: But Rudolfsky was really onto something because he wasn't only about abolishing suits. He thought that at the root of this insane pocket conundrum was a much larger problem, which is about generally what we consider clothing to be.
SPEAKER_11: Clothing hanging on hangers to him looked like people's sort of dead skins. He wanted to be able to show that you could travel to a friend's house and they would have clothes for you because clothing wouldn't be individual to the body. Universal size, universal clothing, unisex clothing. Universal clothing, according to Rudolfsky, would be more like a toga
SPEAKER_02: or a peril that embraced the nature of cloth itself, something that would drape and move naturally. He hated the idea that through clothes we could show ideas about status and gender that were unfair.
SPEAKER_11: He hated the expense, the waste. And so he wanted this really simple cloth. And of course, the images that he showed, his ideas for this new utopian future, are very simple clothing that have no pockets.
SPEAKER_02: A world with no pockets at all and no bags.
SPEAKER_09: You might know the perfect world when you arrive there by its pocketlessness. My college friend Piers got really into researching and reading about pockets
SPEAKER_02: long after his debacle with my dress.
SPEAKER_09: There's this whole strain of thought which suggests that if the world were perfect, if society were perfect, if we lived in a utopia of some kind where you didn't have to worry about your physical safety, you didn't have to worry about somebody robbing your house, you wouldn't need pockets in order to carry money, in order to carry keys. And certainly in the course of time, we have come to hold fewer and fewer things in our pockets.
SPEAKER_02: All those little devices of Jeffersons are contained in a single phone
SPEAKER_11: that we carry externally on our body. And the pocket really is this sort of knowledge envelope, this compartment.
SPEAKER_02: But the phone stays adjacent to us, removed, encased in a bag or pocket. And tech companies have tried to sell us on wearables, on Apple Watches and Google Glasses, which would take your tools out of your pocket entirely and maybe bring us a step closer to that pocketless utopia. But these products haven't taken off in the way they were supposed to. Wearables were foreseen a long time ago and we still feel a little bit anxious about their use.
SPEAKER_11: I think there's just too much doubt at the moment about whether that utopia can ever work. And perhaps one day we will have all of our tools implanted in our skull
SPEAKER_02: or embedded on an accessory which everyone will be able to access in the same way. And then when we get there, pockets will seem just as ancient as Rudofsky thought them to be. Already it seems so antiquated that clothes are needlessly gendered in the way they are. Because we should all have access to the tools we need, or at least a place to put our hands.
SPEAKER_03: The pocket, the piece of paper, words from yesterday. There's a portrait painted on the things we love.
SPEAKER_02: Articles of Interest is made by myself, Avery Treffelman, with editing from Katie Mingle and Joe Rosenberg. Music by Ray Royal, intro and outro themes by Sasami Ashworth, fact check by Graham Haysha, mix by Sharif Youssef, and Roman Mars is the deep pockets of this whole series. Special thanks to Piers Gelly for telling me about this topic in his podcast, Cellar Door, as well as to Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivien Leigh, Kurt Kohlstedt, Sean Riehl, and the whole 99PI team. Music by
SPEAKER_08: Ray Royal, intro and outro themes by Sasami Ashworth, and Roman Mars is the deep pockets of this whole series. Music by Ray Royal, intro and outro themes by Sasami Ashworth, and Roman Mars is the deep pockets of this whole series. Music by Ray Royal, intro and outro themes by Sasami Ashworth, and Roman Mars is the deep pockets of this whole series. Music by Ray Royal, intro and outro themes by Sasami Ashworth, and Roman Mars is the deep pockets of this whole series. Music by Ray Royal, intro and outro themes by Sasami Ashworth, and Roman Mars is the deep pockets of this whole series. Music by Ray Royal, intro and outro themes by Sasami Ashworth, and Roman Mars is the deep pockets of this whole series. in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design headstart. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at canva.com, the home for every brand.
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SPEAKER_02: The fake pockets on women's wear are proof that fashion always takes useful things and makes them ridiculous.
SPEAKER_11: Fashionable dress prefers the assertion of utility to utility itself.
SPEAKER_02: Like how plaid fell into style once it couldn't be worn in Scotland anymore, or how high heels developed from riding shoes but became trendy once we took them off horseback.
SPEAKER_11: Who was it? Oh, Anne Hollander notes that fashion instantly mocks sensible inventions in clothing, subjecting them to unfunctional usage as soon as they appear. And that's absolutely true of pockets. I mean, you can think of the wonderful ornate suits of the macaroni. Like when Yankee Doodle sticks a feather in his hat,
SPEAKER_02: he thinks that makes him one of these dandy macaronis. Who were these British youth in the 1770s and 80s?
SPEAKER_02: These young men with big, elaborate hairdos and these tight little coats. And their coats were so narrow and form-fitting that, once again, in the name of fashion, their front pockets became useless.
SPEAKER_11: And so now they have this pocket that makes no sense. And so tailors invented what is the breast pocket, put it inside the coat at the breast.
SPEAKER_02: Clothing is always shifting in and out of practicality. And sometimes, just because something is useless doesn't mean it's meaningless. Like with a pocket, even if it can't hold much, sometimes it matters that it's there. And sometimes, it matters exactly how it's placed. Your next article of interest is the Hawaiian shirt.
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