There have been many think pieces on this issue, but since the problem still hasn’t gone away, I’m going to write another one - the pockets in women’s clothing are pathetic. Often they are so laughably small as to be completely useless, or they are nonexistent. I have, on more than one occasion, bought a pair of jeans only to bring them home and find that the pockets that I thought they had are FAKE, which are the worst kind. Like, why even bother?? Either use that seam placement to give me a real pocket, or just don’t put it there at all.
Pockets have a disproportionate ability to make me happy, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only woman who feels this way. The reason I love my raincoat (aside from the fact that it’s a trench coat and makes me feel like Sherlock Holmes) is that it has HUGE pockets. I have fit books in these pockets. I have fit water bottles in these pockets. And not the tiny plastic kind, but the larger, reusable kind. They’re great pockets.
This past summer when I was in Italy, I regularly did not feel like carrying a purse with me while sightseeing, so I would try to stuff all of my things in my pockets. It is such a liberating feeling, being able to walk around a city without having to carry a bag of any kind. One day I wore one of the few pairs of jeans I have that actually has all four of the pockets that pants are supposed to have, and managed to fit my money, credit card, ID, map of Venice, church pass, and a water bottle - that larger, reusable kind - into my pockets. I was so excited that I made my friend take a picture of my back and front, so I would have proof of this great system of carrying things called “pockets.”
And forget about finding a dress with pockets - this is like the unicorn of the fashion world. When women are complimenting each other on their dresses and some lucky girl says “Thanks, and it has POCKETS,” all of the women in the group basically swoon with envy. I have two unicorns, and they’re wonderful dresses. But every dress should be a unicorn.
So, all of this being said, last year I started a project - a crusade, if you will - to put pockets in all of my clothes that should have pockets and don’t. I’m not exactly a seamstress (far from it), but I know how to sew well enough to mend seams and replace buttons. I figured most of these pockets would be on the inside of my clothes, so who cares if my stitches are kind of screwy? They don’t have to be pretty, they just have to exist. I started with the worst offender of the lot, a pair of black jeans that had fake pockets in the front and weren’t even pretending in the back. I took the back pockets off of a pair of jeans that I couldn’t wear anymore (since I don’t know of any graceful way to fix a hole in the pants crotch) and sewed them onto these other jeans. Figuring out how to take apart the seam of the fake pocket, fashion a piece of cloth into an inside pocket and sew it in place was harder, but I figured it out. If you look closely at the stitches you can tell that they were done by me, by hand, but I do not care. I now have a pocket - a large, useful one - where once there was only deceit.
(I’ve procrastinated on putting the other one in, so awkwardly, there is only a front pocket on the right. I’m working on it, ok?)
The other day I had this crazy dream in which I rescued a bunch of kittens from a Tyrannosaurus rex (this is related, stay with me). I dreamed I was trapped in a kind of underground bunker with this T-rex on the loose - it wasn’t near me, but I could hear it roaring and thrashing around in another part of the compound. I was trying to gather up a bunch of things and get out of there in a hurry, when I came across this litter of tiny kittens. They looked like they were sick, maybe dying, and somehow I knew that their mom wasn’t coming back and I had to save them. I wanted to make sure I could keep my hands free, so I put one of them in my breast pocket, and then I had NO POCKETS LEFT that would fit the other four. These kittens were tiny, I could hold two of them with one hand, but they still would not fit in the minuscule pockets in my jeans. I ended up having to create a sling out of a ripped shirt in order to carry them, and all the while I could hear this T-rex coming closer and closer.
(The dream was actually a lot more complicated than this - Hollywood, if anyone out there is reading this, I have your story for the next Jurassic Park movie).
So I guess what I’m saying is, it would have been a lot easier for me to save these kittens and escape from a giant carnivorous dinosaur if women’s clothing had better pockets.