More Pockets

Summary

Articles of Interest: More Pockets – Detailed Summary

Host: Avery Trufelman
Guest: Hannah Carlson
Release Date: September 27, 2023

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Introduction to the Episode

In the episode titled "More Pockets" of Articles of Interest, host Avery Trufelman revisits a foundational topic from the podcast's first season—the humble pocket. This episode not only delves deeper into the origins and societal implications of pockets but also features an updated conversation with author Hannah Carlson, whose book on the subject has just been released.

The Origin Story: Avery and Piers' First Encounter and the Issue of Pockets

The episode kicks off with Avery recounting her initial interaction with Piers Getley during their first week of college. They attended a freshman mixer with a cross-dressing theme, where Avery lent Piers a "pink swirly patterned mini dress from the '60s." This exchange led to an amusing yet insightful mishap:

Hannah Carlson (04:37): "I had never worn a dress before... all the things I did at the time seemed to have been."

Avery Trufelman (05:08): "Avery loaned Piers a pink swirly patterned mini dress... but Piers wanted to make sure he didn't make that mistake again. He couldn't lose his keys at the party."

This incident highlighted a significant design flaw in women's clothing—the absence of functional pockets, setting the stage for the episode's exploration.

Historical Evolution of Pockets: From Functionality to Fashion

The conversation shifts to the historical development of pockets, emphasizing their separate existence in women's fashion compared to men's integrated designs.

Avery Trufelman (06:17): "Womenswear is littered with fake pockets that don't open or shallow pockets that could hardly hold a paperclip."

Piers Getley (07:04): "They use the men's pockets because the women's are smaller and they can put things in them."

Hannah Carlson provides an in-depth look at how pockets evolved from separate pouches in the medieval era to integrated features in men's clothing by the late 17th century. Women's pockets, in contrast, remained detached and were often accessories like pouches tied around the waist.

Gender Disparities in Pocket Design

The episode delves into the persistent gender disparities in pocket design, highlighting how women's pockets have been intentionally marginalized.

Avery Trufelman (09:36): "Pockets are just a perfect metaphor for privilege... there's no reason for women's pockets to be so small."

Historically, pockets for women were functional, as large as they were for men in the 18th century. Over time, especially during the 19th century, women's fashion shifted towards slimmer silhouettes, resulting in smaller or nonexistent pockets. This change was not merely aesthetic but reflected deeper societal constructs around gender and utility.

Pockets as Cultural and Social Symbols

Pockets transcend their practical use, serving as symbols of autonomy, preparedness, and even social status.

Piers Getley (07:47): "The pocket is seen to be a monopoly of the male sex... as women's fashions change, pockets can be lost."

Through the ages, pockets have represented personal space and security. They have been associated with preparedness for public life, contrasting with the private necessities carried in women's accessories like reticules.

The Decline of Pockets and the Rise of Purses

With the decline of functional pockets in women's clothing, the purse emerged as the primary accessory for carrying essentials. This shift brought its own set of societal implications.

Piers Getley (13:53): "Reticules... held maybe a few coins and some keys... and you could hang the loops of the drawstring around your wrist."

The transition to purses symbolized both a loss of practical functionality and an increase in the commercialization of fashion. Purses became status symbols, often elaborately decorated but limited in capacity, reflecting the ongoing debate about fashion versus utility.

Contemporary Efforts to Reintroduce Practical Pockets

Modern designers have been battling to reintroduce practical pockets into women's fashion, facing resistance from manufacturers and prevailing fashion norms.

Piers Getley (34:58): "American sportswear designers... have been saying, okay, we've had it. We want practical clothing for women on the go, and we're going to make big, obvious pockets."

Designers like Claire McCardell and Bonnie Cashin championed the inclusion of functional pockets without compromising style. However, challenges persist, as incorporating pockets requires additional design considerations and often faces aesthetic pushback.

The Future of Pockets: Utopian Visions and Technological Changes

The discussion speculates on the future of pockets in an increasingly digital and potentially tech-integrated society.

Piers Getley (21:27): "Maybe one day we will have all of our tools implanted in our skull or embedded on an accessory... pockets will seem just as ancient."

This vision aligns with Hannah Carlson's exploration of pockets as placeholders for personal tools, suggesting that technological advancements might render traditional pockets obsolete or transform their purpose entirely.

Updated Conversation with Hannah Carlson on Her New Book

The latter part of the episode features an updated conversation with Hannah Carlson about her newly released book, "An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close." This discussion expands on the multifaceted role of pockets throughout history, touching on themes like privacy, autonomy, and societal norms.

Piers Getley (23:02): "Pockets speak to this question of preparedness and your ability to move in public and to be confident."

Hannah Carlson: Details how pockets facilitate private space in public settings, enabling individuals to carry personal items discreetly. This has implications for personal security and autonomy, especially in contexts like escaping slavery, where pockets became markers of freedom.

The conversation also explores legal perspectives on pockets versus bags, referencing the Supreme Court case Wyoming vs. Houghton to illustrate how pockets hold different legal and social significance compared to purses.

Piers Getley (31:11): Discusses how design and usage of pockets versus bags influence privacy rights and societal perceptions.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

More Pockets serves as a comprehensive exploration of an often-overlooked garment feature, revealing how pockets are intertwined with gender, functionality, and societal values. Through historical analysis and contemporary discourse, Avery Trufelman and Hannah Carlson shed light on the profound implications pockets have on everyday life and cultural constructs.

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For those interested in a deeper dive, Hannah Carlson's book, "An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close," offers an extensive examination of pocket history and its societal impacts.

Transcript

[Avery Trufelman]

Hello, it's Avery. Let me just break the fourth wall here for a second and just say thank you so much for listening to Articles of Interest. I really can't tell you how much it means to me. This is. I mean, I make this by myself. I also am like the engineer and the one in Pro Tools. It just takes so long for me to make all these shows. And I strive to make articles of interest something that is worth your time and your attention is just the most valuable gift you could give. So thank you very much for letting articles of interest be a part of your life. So I'm gonna do something this episode that I haven't done yet, which is a rerun, but it's got a really good reason. This is the episode that I did way back in the first season of Articles of interest in 2018 called pockets. And man, it is like the story that launched a thousand conversations. There's so much to say about Pockets, so much so that there is going to be a part two after the rerun of a conversation that I had with author Hannah Carlson, who is in the original episode, and her book entirely about Pockets, is out now. And we were in conversation live at the New York Public Library. And I've condensed that and added a little bit at the end for you. Enjoy.

[Piers Getley]

We're living through a pretty rocky present.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

Maybe the past can help. Check out Radiotopia's this Day, hosted by Jodi Avergan with historians Nicole Hemmer and Kelly Carter Jackson. Three times a week, they take you into one story from that day in U.S. history. From Eisenhower's weird vendetta against squirrels to.

[Piers Getley]

The time we accidentally dropped a nuclear.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

Bomb on North Carolina, to the women who fought against the right to vote. It's smart, surprising, and actually fun. This is a big moment for history. Next year is America's 250th birthday and, well, look around. There's lots of history being made. Subscribe to this Day for your historical perspective wherever you get your podcasts, as well as YouTube and Instagram.

[Avery Trufelman]

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[Hannah Carlson]

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.

[Avery Trufelman]

I met Piers on our very first week in college.

[Hannah Carlson]

It must have been day one or two. It was really early.

[Avery Trufelman]

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.

[Hannah Carlson]

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.

[Avery Trufelman]

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. 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.

[Hannah Carlson]

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.

[Avery Trufelman]

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. 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.

[Hannah Carlson]

I immediately locked myself out of my room. And 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

Piers 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.

[Hannah Carlson]

And I believe I just clutched my keys in my hand and thought about it really hard all night, which sounds crazy.

[Avery Trufelman]

Articles of interest. A show about what we wear.

[Piers Getley]

And so maybe the idea is about, quote, you can attach ideas about class.

[Avery Trufelman]

An idea of home, to a piece of cloth. Any fool can wear clothes, but if.

[Barbara Berman]

You ain't got the attitude and style.

[Avery Trufelman]

To carry it off, man, you're just a clothes horse. Womenswear 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? I'm ready for this. The women wear the men's really, because the pockets are too small on the women's. Wait, really? That's why.

[Piers Getley]

That is why.

[Avery Trufelman]

But there is a women's that they make, 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. Yes.

[Piers Getley]

And they won't fit.

[Avery Trufelman]

That's fascinating. Now you have something to blog about. I'll give you something to blog about. 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.

[Piers Getley]

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.

[Avery Trufelman]

Hannah Carlson lectures at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she teaches classes in material culture, fashion history, and fashion theory, and she is working on a book about pockets.

[Piers Getley]

If the formal question for me is what difference does it make? You know, what's the difference between a pocket and a bag? And I think the key difference is that the pocket is internal and it's secret.

[Avery Trufelman]

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.

[Piers Getley]

You don't have to think about it. You forget about it, but you still have stuff in there. It is seen as this territory of your own that connects you to the objects you carry. Those objects become part of you.

[Avery Trufelman]

Case in point, Thomas Jefferson.

[Piers Getley]

Jefferson was called a walking calculator. For all of the miniature tools and devices he carried, 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

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.

[Piers Getley]

One woman noted that her son was better equipped than she or her daughter. 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

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. 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.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

You could hold quite a lot in 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

This is Clarissa Esqueira.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

Yes, I'm Clarissa Esquera. I am the associate curator of costume and textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

[Avery Trufelman]

And where are we now?

[Clarissa Esqueira]

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.

[Avery Trufelman]

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.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

Pockets being suspended from the waist has a really long history.

[Piers Getley]

Actually.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

It started for both men and women in the medieval era. They were suspended from their waist over their clothes. 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

And women's pockets remained separate from the rest of clothing. Oh, kind of like a fanny pack. No, no, no, no. I think. 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?

[Clarissa Esqueira]

Yes.

[Avery Trufelman]

And in some cases, these pouches were 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 slits in them.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

Women had slits made in the petticoats and dresses, and they could access their pockets by going through those slits.

[Avery Trufelman]

You could reach through your dress to get to your detachable pocket pouches. Does that make sense? Sure, why not?

[Clarissa Esqueira]

Would you like to see them? 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

I'm actually just going to cut to the complicated, expensive, fancy pockets. They are indeed very splendid. Oh, wow.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

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.

[Avery Trufelman]

Oh, my God.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

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.

[Avery Trufelman]

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. And then came the French Revolution.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

The French Revolution happened, which in many.

[Avery Trufelman]

Ways was a revolution against excess.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

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.

[Piers Getley]

So when you get to the 1800 and the empire style, where the waist is pretty much gone, you know, think of Jane Austen movies. You have the columnar silhouette, a silhouette.

[Avery Trufelman]

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.

[Piers Getley]

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.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

And at the time they called them reticules because they were so small, like ridiculous.

[Avery Trufelman]

Like ridiculous reticules were teeny, teeny tiny little drawstring pouches, elaborately beaded and decorated. 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.

[Piers Getley]

You have to remember to carry it. It's easy to lose. People can steal it. That's the formal difference.

[Avery Trufelman]

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.

[Barbara Berman]

They're very fancy, beautiful things, shell shaped or made of silk and gorgeous things. They're to be seen. They're not particularly capacious.

[Avery Trufelman]

This is dress historian Barbara Berman.

[Barbara Berman]

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.

[Avery Trufelman]

The fashion press made pockets of 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.

[Barbara Berman]

They have these beautiful little reticules and they're much more fashionable. 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 do. They don't have that kind of life. They're much more out and about. And so you have. The pocket anti pocketist debate is strung along to gain readership.

[Avery Trufelman]

I suppose 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, 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.

[Barbara Berman]

A woman could perfectly well have a pair of pockets and also a reticule for when she wanted to be at show air. They coexist. 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

So why don't we have these anymore? If it wasn't the Columbia silhouette?

[Barbara Berman]

Search me. You know, if you can come up with a good answer. 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

The women's wear that had integrated pockets tended to be feminized versions of menswear made by men.

[Barbara Berman]

They're made by tailors, not dressmakers. And out of habits, the tailors would be putting in proper, fitted in pockets, so to speak, like men's pockets, because they were using male tailoring techniques.

[Avery Trufelman]

Basically, if an outfit had an inset pocket, it was a uselessly proportioned version of a man's pattern.

[Piers Getley]

The pocket is seen to be a monopoly of the male sex. Eventually, pockets and trousers are one. And as women's female fashions change, pockets can be lost.

[Avery Trufelman]

And as men's fashions change, pockets can be gained. And they were 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.

[Clarissa Esqueira]

Copious amounts of pockets. I can't even. Like you have your ticket pocket for the train, 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

Both gendered extremes were starting to get.

[Piers Getley]

Terrible because pockets had proliferated. They had become completely worthless. You couldn't find anything. You stop on the street, you have to pat yourself down to remember where you've left your wallet.

[Avery Trufelman]

The average man of 1944 had 24 pockets. Way too many, at least according to Bernard Rudolphski.

[Piers Getley]

He was kind of enraged by the way that pockets kept sort of popping up.

[Avery Trufelman]

Bernard Rudolfsky was an architect, a modernist architect. And modernists were really into sleek, simple buildings that were absolutely functional with no excess.

[Piers Getley]

He was this modernist who wanted to make clothing perfectly rational.

[Avery Trufelman]

And he found it ironic that all his fellow rational modernist architects were all wearing suits.

[Piers Getley]

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. 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

And to prove his point, God love him, Rudolfsky puts on an exhibit at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1944. And it was called Are clothes modern? Question mark.

[Piers Getley]

Are clothes modern? Was the question. Psst.

[Avery Trufelman]

The answer was no. 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.

[Piers Getley]

We have color coded the pockets in his shirt, in his vest, in his coat and overcoat. And you see this wonderful sort of chaotic overlay of 24 pockets.

[Avery Trufelman]

The average suit had 24 pockets and 70 buttons. Rudolfski was really passionate about how completely silly and redundant this was.

[Piers Getley]

The guy is a wonderful nutball.

[Avery Trufelman]

But Rudolfski 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.

[Piers Getley]

Clothing hanging on hangers to him looked like people's sort of dead skins, you know, and he wanted to be able to show that we, you know, you could travel to a friend's house and they would have clothes for you, because clothing wouldn't be individual to the body now. Universal size and universal clothing. Unisex clothing.

[Avery Trufelman]

Universal clothing, according to Rudolfsky, would be more like a toga or apparel that embraced the nature of cloth itself, something that would drape and move naturally, you.

[Piers Getley]

Know, he hated the idea that through clothes we could show ideas about status and gender that were unfair. He hated the expense, the waste. And so he wanted this, you know, 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.

[Avery Trufelman]

A world with no pockets at all and no bags.

[Hannah Carlson]

You might know the perfect world when you arrive there by its pocketlessness.

[Avery Trufelman]

My college friend Piers got really into researching and reading about pockets, Pockets. Long after his debacle with my dress.

[Hannah Carlson]

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.

[Avery Trufelman]

And certainly in the course of time, we have come to hold fewer and fewer things in our pockets.

[Piers Getley]

All those little devices, the Jeffersons, are contained in a single phone that we carry externally on our body. And the pocket really is this sort of knowledge envelope, this compartment.

[Avery Trufelman]

But the phone stays adjacent to us, removed, encased in a bag or pocket.

[Piers Getley]

I think there's just too much doubt at the moment about whether that utopia can ever work.

[Avery Trufelman]

And perhaps one day we will have all of our tools implanted in our skull or embedded on an accessory, which everyone will be able to in the same way. And then when we get there, pockets will seem just as ancient as Rudolfski 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 after the break. So much more to say about pockets. Just checking the recording here. This is so cool that you all are here at like 2pm on a Friday. This is such a treat. We were like, well, we'll just talk to each other and, like, maybe no one will show up. And this is like a real maybe.

[Piers Getley]

Someone, you know, the procrastinating grad student who really can't figure it out is going to show up yet.

[Avery Trufelman]

Hannah Carlson, one of the original guests in the episode, wrote a whole book with even more to say about pockets, and it finally came out. It just came out. So we have to celebrate. Here is an updated conversation with Hannah Carlson about her new book, An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close. We had this conversation live at the New York Public Library, so I hope you enjoy. Yeah. Okay. Getting down to business. Any given garment has buttons, it has zippers, it has all these different features and fixtures. What makes pockets different?

[Piers Getley]

It took an embarrassingly long time for me to figure that out. I suddenly thought, oh, right, they're this weird, odd man out. We have zippers and belt loops and ties, and they all help us adjust the fit of your clothes. Take them on, take them off. Pockets are amazing because they're the only functional element of dress that have nothing to do with fit. It is like this, I say, wily hitchhiker who just, like, snuck on and stuck to us. It's not just functional, they're this funny add on.

[Avery Trufelman]

So one of the interesting things about pockets is that they say a lot about our relationship to each other. And how did the placement of the pocket how did that change the way that people related to each other in society?

[Piers Getley]

Well, I think the fascinating thing about a pocket is it's not a purse. And the two are really related. The word pocket means little bag. But what that allowed was this notion of private space. You could have private space in public, hid about a man's body were all these secret spaces. And that was threatening. You can't tell what's in pockets. And they marked this change from these rough warriors who could show you what they had. They had weapons at their sides, swords and daggers. And the shift to this notion of secrecy becoming important coincides with, I think, the insertion of pockets.

[Avery Trufelman]

So you brought up the idea of weapons and the idea of danger, which is actually a huge part of pocket history.

[Piers Getley]

It is so crazy. I think that was one of the things that surprised me most was that the pocket was this sensational sort of surprise. It was threatening and dangerous. And the first handguns that could be small were pocket pistols that had a wheel lock mechanism. So instead of a gun that was a couple of feet long that you had to stop, light a taper and light it and shoot it for the first time you had a gun that you could actually carry in your pocket and use. The press was really up in arms when the first assassination of a world leader by a handgun occurred because the Prince of Orange shows up and says, I'm going to hand you a letter. And it looks as though that's what he's doing to the king. And instead he brings out his pocket pistol and assassinates him. And leaders, world leaders like Queen Elizabeth were very anxious about this and they tried to write all these sumptuary laws which said you shouldn't carry any small scale weapon on your person.

[Avery Trufelman]

Well, it really changes the notion of.

[Piers Getley]

Valor absolutely, because you didn't have to show your valor. It could be hidden. You could be the most slumpy guy and not at all dangerous or threatening. And what do you have this secret weapon that you're carrying inside your pockets? I think that's what freaked people out and what made it sort of sensational.

[Avery Trufelman]

And so another aspect of danger as it relates to the pocket is the idea of like the pickpocket. You say a pickpocket is different than a cut purse. How so?

[Piers Getley]

So for centuries, people have bags tied around their waists and they might dangle from your side. And the cut purse was somebody who had to get close to you and cut the purse. The pickpocket was called a pocket diver. A pickpocket is someone who is much more devious and had to have many more skills.

[Avery Trufelman]

When you're talking about, like, the new sort of intimacy that's now required to rob someone when they have a pocket, what you're saying is that pockets allow sort of an extension of your. Your personhood, like who you are is augmented by having pockets. And so how do we see pockets as a sign of sort of autonomy and dominion, play out amongst people who were escaping slavery.

[Piers Getley]

So enslavers would use ads, runaway advertisements, and in them, there's lots of description of clothing. And in those descriptions, every once in a while there's some mention of pockets.

[Avery Trufelman]

And so that's so amazing that it says it in that, like, wanted reward. This is what he's wearing. It had pockets. Like they. It's noted enough that it's in the description.

[Piers Getley]

Well, and so that also suggests that when we see clothing today, it's just like part of the picture. You wouldn't even notice that their presence, although women notice their absence. But it's something that in the 18th century imagination, it's a detail that counts. But it looks as though also some runaways added pockets and pocket flaps and cuffs in order to make that suit not only more functional, but to look like you could pass as a gentleman. So if you're going to show up and be a free black person in Charleston, you could pass yourself off as.

[Avery Trufelman]

Free by having pockets.

[Piers Getley]

By looking like you had a suit that had the parts it needed. Right. By having pockets.

[Avery Trufelman]

Tell me about the life and times of the pose of putting your hands in your pockets. Because this used to be kind of controversial, right?

[Piers Getley]

Absolutely. So in etiquette, your hand is way too close to the erogenous zone. Pockets, as the poet Harold Nemerov said, are dark spaces over and around erogenous zones. And you bet, you bet there were moms and teachers who sewed up pockets because they did not want boys hands anywhere near their pockets. So throughout the 18th and 19th century, get your hands out of your pockets is a refrain that we're familiar with. Because it was rude.

[Avery Trufelman]

Yeah. So that has long sort of been the association with hands and pockets. How did Walt Whitman take all these meanings and subvert them?

[Piers Getley]

I think he didn't want to look like he had a silver fork in his mouth. He wants to look like nature's aristocrat, like earthy but elegant. He wants to change it into something that we could all approach.

[Avery Trufelman]

And so in his. So this means, like in his author's illustration for Leaves of Grass, he's got his Hands in his pockets. I mean, I feel like that sort of changed author photos forever.

[Piers Getley]

Well, Emerson, who I put right next to, right next to Whitman, says, oh my God, I'm going to read this book. Even though the author's portrait looks so vulgar, even though this is really sort of very dubious. And I think when we look at Victorians now, we can't help but think they look so staid and Walt Whitman looks so familiar. And it's because we all do that now. Right?

[Avery Trufelman]

Right, right. And so like now if you, you know, on, on YouTube, there are all manner of videos of like, what's in my bag? Even in old, in magazines, they're like, oh, what so and so can't live without what they carry with them all the time. And as you write in your book, we've just always been obsessed with this idea of what are people carrying with them? So a two part question. One, why are we so obsessed with like, what's in my bag? And two, how do we see the contents of a pocket different than the contents of a bag?

[Piers Getley]

Okay, part one, I think we're obsessed because pocketed collections are something you're not supposed to show. They're not a kind of collection, like a library in your home that you're willing to put on show. It's supposed to reveal something authentically about you that maybe you didn't want to reveal. And I think that the reason that Lincoln's pockets, the contents of his pockets are so often visited at the Library of Congress is because we hope to get some sense of who he actually was. Some little hint, this is what he put in his pockets when he thought nobody was looking, what he thought he needed the night that he went to the theater and was assassinated, what were in his pockets? You know, normal sort of everyday things, except the few couple things like he had the couple of good reviews from his last presidential campaign. And the idea that this sort of wonderful figure who everybody reveres also needed a little like, yeah, we loved you. You know, I think maybe is useful.

[Avery Trufelman]

To hear, okay, but then, you know, how are the contents of a pocket treated differently than the contents of a purse or a bag?

[Piers Getley]

I have heard people say, well, women have handbags. Why the Fuss? In a 1999 Supreme Court case, Wyoming vs. Houghton suggested that there was actually something to worry about. So in this case, the question was, do you have the same Fourth Amendment rights if you are carrying a handbag or if you have a wallet in your suit, do you have protection from unreasonable search and seizure? And the answer is in three states of the Union, you do not. If you are living in Ohio, Wyoming, or Montana, you have, it seems, far less protection of your privacy. So in this specific case, the police stopped a car. The driver was under suspicion. The driver can be searched. Suspicionless passengers in the car cannot be searched, but a car can be searched. So the trunk can be searched in any container. In this case, the woman who was a suspicionless passenger happened to be carrying a purse, and that purse was searched. And that was the issue. Should that have been allowed?

[Avery Trufelman]

And so she. So this was in Wyoming. And she brought the case.

[Piers Getley]

She brought the case because they did actually find drug paraphernalia in her purse, but she was suspicionless, and there was no reason for the police to search her purse. And Anton Scalia said, that purse is like any other container in the car. Breyer said, you know, I think we should understand that the purse is a woman's special property. It's like an outer kind of clothing. We should protect that just like we protect the person.

[Avery Trufelman]

But then, like, didn't the. So it ultimately came down to, like, where the purse was held. Right?

[Piers Getley]

The purse was tossed in the back seat. And Breyer said, well, if she had been holding it in her lap, I think I would have dissented, but, you know, I'll go with precedent.

[Avery Trufelman]

And so this means, like, the design of the purse matters if it's something that you, like, hold to you versus toss in the car.

[Piers Getley]

In certain cases, design matters that much that you cannot be searched when you have. When you are suspicionless, when you are wearing pockets. But your purse in certain conditions could be searched.

[Avery Trufelman]

So why do purses persist today?

[Piers Getley]

Well, people also love purses. Bags are great. I mean, you know, for suffragists, the purse was a badge of servitude because you always had to lug it around. But many other people love purses. And did I already tell this story? There's Diana Vreeland arrived at Harper's Bazaar, and she said, I want to have a whole issue devoted to pockets. I want to suggest how great pockets can be and how designers should use them. And I want to get rid of my bloody old handbag. I hate it. We need to devote issues to pockets. The editor, whom she accosted with this decision ran to the editor in chief, who ran back to Diana Vreeland to say, you are out of your mind. We have to sell magazines and we have to sell purses per sponsors, and you cannot do this.

[Avery Trufelman]

Well, I mean, it should be said that, like, bags are a massive source of income, especially since the 1980s and the rise of multinational conglomerates like LVMH. The markup on a bag is magnitudes of order larger than clothes. And also in an e commerce era, they require no sizing. They're the easiest movable piece of clout that a brand can sell.

[Piers Getley]

Every brand depends on it. It is the lifeblood of the fashion industry. Absolutely.

[Avery Trufelman]

So is it a conspiracy?

[Piers Getley]

I don't want to go there. There are too many conspiracies out there in this day and age, so I don't want to go there.

[Avery Trufelman]

And so, you know, we talked about why men and women historically had different sized pockets. Tell me about some of the female designers who really had to fight to change that.

[Piers Getley]

They're American sportswear designers starting in the 30s and 40s say, okay, we've had it. We want practical clothing for women on the go, and we're going to make big, obvious pockets. And Designers like Claire McCardell, she won this contest for Harper's Bazaar to make a cheap house dress and sticks this huge quilted pocket right at the hip. And she wanted to make something vibrant but also useful. And then folks like Bonnie Cashin, who are making more expensive garments, also want to equip women for all of their travels. So what I love about these designers is that they're using pockets. They're adding them as useful decoration, and they're suggesting that you can put a pocket and it will not change the silhouette for so long. Women say, oh, it has to be slimming. A pocket will bulge you out. If I put pockets in that dress, it's gonna bulge you out all over, is what Elizabeth Cady Stanton's dressmaker says to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I am not gonna add a pocket to your dress, even if you're begging me to do this. And Elizabeth Cady Stanton writes a whole article about this. And I think these designers, American sportswear designers, were saying, you can put a pocket on all over the place.

[Avery Trufelman]

Although not everyone was so easily convinced. I mean, like, didn't they have to fight against their bosses and their manufacturers to let them include the pockets?

[Piers Getley]

Claire McCardell is always arguing with her production manager. Drag down fights about making sure that, that, that they could include pockets. It's like, no, no, we don't want to do this. I mean, same deal with today. Fast fashion. What's the first thing that's going to go? What's easy to get rid of a pocket?

[Avery Trufelman]

It's not.

[Piers Getley]

Well, it's not easy, and it's not.

[Avery Trufelman]

Easy to make they're not easy to make.

[Piers Getley]

This is what my students at Rhode Island School of Design told me. It's a commitment to add a pocket. You have to, like, fit it and think about how it's going to work and it has to be flat and you have to try it 25 times before you get it right when you're making a pattern. And that's the kind of time and effort that quickly goes by the wayside. It's the first to go when expense is considered or, oh, I want it to look like that movie star. And I'm going to not include a pocket at all.

[Avery Trufelman]

Well, I was. So I was going to ask you. Yeah. How do you think that the conversation around Pockets has evolved even since we've talked last? Because I just feel like it has. Pockets has become this. I'm gonna say it's become like a bit of a girl bossy, rallying cry. In a weird way. It feels like they've never been more in the discourse, but it's seems to have gone a little bit awry to me.

[Piers Getley]

I would agree.

[Avery Trufelman]

Really?

[Piers Getley]

Yeah, I would. Yeah. And absolutely. Because it's not. We still are not at a place where it's standard and expected. It's a rallying cry and it's the first to go when other things are more important. All sorts of brands are saying by me, we are including pockets in our women's wear, but I think the most movement has been bags of for menswear. The fashion handbag for menswear has made greater strides in these last few years since we've talked than including pockets and women's wear. And this was noted by virginia Someone in 1918. Pockets come and go and they still do.

[Avery Trufelman]

I think that's all. This was really fun. Thank you, Hannah.

[Piers Getley]

Thank you, Avery.

[Avery Trufelman]

Pockets. That was a conversation with Hannah Carlson live at the New York Public Library. Check out her book An Intimate history of how we keep things close. It's so good. The original episode was made back when the show was nestled in The Womb of 99% Invisible, the best podcast in the world. That original episode was edited by Katie Mingle and Joe Rosenberg, with fact checking by Graham Haisha, mixed by Sharif Youssef, executive produced by Roman Mars, with music by Sesame Ashworth and Ray Royal, with special thanks also to Piers Getley, Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lay, Kurt Kolstead and the rest of the 99pi family. There's a portrait painted on the things we love.

[Piers Getley]

Radiotopia.

[Avery Trufelman]

From prx.