When it comes to jeans pockets, size really matters (and is not just a matter of style)

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“We love the women who aspire to freedom pockets”

“Men have pockets to store things, women for ornament” cit. Christian Dior. We are in 1954, and this statement at the time had its logic (fashion), but 64 years later, in a social context in which we constantly fight for gender equality, it inevitably acquires a bitter connotation. As the Telegraph explains in an illuminating excursus of the role of pockets in fashion, behind the habit of not providing enough compartments to the feminine outfits (even those that are described and sold as mannish) would hide ill-concealed sexism that “amounts to putting the feminine form above human function “. The counter-proof is given to us by the dear boyfriend jeans, literally the boyfriend’s jeans, softer, with the low crotch, the straight leg (often high-waisted, ripped and cropped), cut to emulate the lines of the male denim but which fail heavily on a detail (which is by no means negligible). Guess what? The size of the pockets that remain “feminine” despite the premises. “The front pockets of my boyfriend jeans are only 14.5 cm deep, too small for my hands, just big enough for my mignon wallet and certainly not at all comfortable for my iPhone Plus. My jeans have pockets that would make them laugh a boy, “writes Chelsea G Summers in the Manchester newspaper.

“If my boyfriend jeans were really made for a man, they would have front pockets at least 23 centimeters deep,” or The Pudding says, which to say it measured the pockets of 80 pairs of men’s and women’s jeans. Result? “The pockets of women’s jeans are 48% shorter and 6.5% narrower than men’s pockets regardless of style and model.” Perhaps because it is taken for granted that women hardly give up the stock market (and perhaps not to damage the lucrative bag market, which pockets remain smaller or non-existent?), But it is useless to deny that in 2018 this pretext is anachronistic. “Women are busy, and they need to carry things as easily as men,” Chelsea always writes. “Fashion still resists giving us what we want, when what we want are bigger pockets. It is neither difficult nor expensive to make women’s pockets functional – after all, fashion does it for men – so what’s the reason of all these useless pockets in women’s clothes? The answer is a heady mix of sexism and patriarchal fear “.

For the suffragettes, for example (in addition to the white color, which both Hillary Clinton and Melania Trump borrowed as a powerful message), the pockets had become a political issue. A 1910 fashion show at the Astor Hotel in New York, in fact, presented a “suffragette costume” that boasted “two front pockets and two back pockets” for a total of seven or eight pockets, all insight and easy to find”. Thus, in the suffrage movement, the pockets were an integral part of their battle and not surprisingly The Old Lady With at Hundred Pockets was the title of one of their fundraising events in 1908, clearly for the benefit of the organizations that supported the right to vote to women. The women got it. But the pockets? Not exactly. “We women who love pockets aspire to freedom. The dream of having pockets large enough to carry the phone, keys, wallet, and lipstick is a dream of independence”.