'It has pockets!!!' The joy — and tyranny — of women's desire for design equity

A woman edited the human genome, discovered a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy and led political revolutions. So why is it so hard to find a place to put our wallet and keys? Since the mid-2010s, the internet has been flooded with memes, ads and hashtags like #GiveMePocketsOrGiveMeDeath. Sure, they’re useful, but why do we love to celebrate a skirt or dress by shouting, “It has pockets!!!”?

The humble pocket, a few pieces of material, is more than just a place to hold our phone or a place to hide our hands when we don’t know what to do with them. It’s part of the fabric of fashion history that touches on labor, class, gender and who has the right to travel light.

And while pockets on women’s clothing have come in and out of style over the past few centuries, in 2024, we’re still schlepping our daily essentials around in our handbags when men’s clothing allows for hands-free convenience. It’s time to talk about pocket equity.

A brief history of women’s pockets

According to Hannah Carlson, a senior lecturer of apparel design at Rhode Island School of Design and the author of Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close, pockets, whether attached to the clothing with a belt or sewn into the garment itself, have been in use since medieval times. In the late 1600s, women began to wear tie-on pockets that served as a sort of undergarment that could be accessed from slits on the side of a dress.

“Women’s pockets were even bigger in the 1700s, when wide-hoop petticoats concealed detachable pockets,” fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, author of the book Skirts, tells Yahoo Life. “The bustles of the 1880s had pockets hidden in their cavities.”

Around the turn of the century, while men were able to tote around everything from wallets, keys, cigarette cases and even flasks, pioneering feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman voiced their rage over skimpy or nonexistent pockets on female clothing.

Why did women need pockets anyway, when they could just carry a purse, men said? As Carlson noted in a 2024 lecture at the Providence Athenaeum, "The handbag must be lugged around, it takes psychic energy to remember where you put it. It could be lost or stolen." Feminists, she added, "called the handbag ‘a badge of servitude.’”

Fighting silhouette sexism

When Brooke Shields said “nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” she wasn't kidding. Over decades, skintight styles for women have made pockets a total afterthought. Why would a woman want to keep her wallet in her pocket when it could make her look — gasp — wider?

So often in women’s clothing, pockets are about flattering placement rather than usefulness. The fear that side pockets on trousers can cause a woman to “look big” has caused many working women to buy pocketless pants and jackets or worse, ones with faux pockets (just the flap, no actual pocket sleeve).

Was it any coincidence that big handbags were all the rage in the 2000s, the era of tight, low-rise jeans? Where else could women store their Razr phones, lip balms and essentials needed for a night out?

In 2018, designers Jan Diehm and Amber Thomas dug into the denim data, measuring the pockets in 80 pairs of jeans (including both men’s and women’s skinny and straight jean styles, all in a 32-inch waist) from 20 manufacturers. The result: Women’s pockets are the worst.

On average, the pockets in women’s jeans are 48% shorter and 6.5% narrower than men’s pockets. “You can’t even cram an average woman’s hand beyond the knuckles into the majority of women’s front pockets,” their report notes. (Try it in 2024, it’s still true!)

Why do pockets make us so happy?

“Pockets mean freedom,” fashion psychologist and lecturer Dion Terrelonge tells Yahoo Life. “Women carry little bags with their lip balm or powder or a hairbrush for our constant upkeep to be socially acceptable. These are things that men just don’t deal with.”

Pockets are more than just practical. When celebrities like Cara Delevingne, Victoria Beckham and Olivia Colman pose with their hands in their pockets, they’re demonstrating that women’s fashion is functional rather than just frivolous. The ability to put one’s hands in one’s pockets, whether on the red carpet or in a board meeting, can create a more relaxed posture and a feeling of confidence. And everyone deserves a deep and secure pocket to hold a credit card.

Summer Lucille is the owner of Juicy Body Goddess, a clothing boutique in Charlotte, N.C., that caters to larger-size women. Nearly all the dresses she sells have pockets.

“Pockets offer a security blanket because it allows them to feel safer and at home in their own body,” she tells Yahoo Life. “Not only that, they offer the wearer the ability to manipulate their clothing around them.”

All these centuries later, pockets are not just personal, they’re political.

“Society believes if husbands had pockets, women did not need them,” Lucille says. “Women had no access to money or property so no need for wives to have pockets. Adding pockets gives power back to women.”