POCKETS: AN INTIMATE HISTORY….

WE’VE ALL GOT THEM—EVEN WOMEN THESE DAYS. But, as Alexandra Jacobs says in The New York Times Book Review, “In her nifty ‘Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close,’ Hannah Carlson unbuttons the politics behind who gets to hide their belongings, and where.” 

Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close, by Hannah Carlson, Algonquin Books, 2023. 

As described in IndieBound, Hannah Carlson is “a senior lecturer in the apparel design department at the Rhode Island School of Design, she has acted as the faculty fellow in Costumes and Textiles at the RISD Museum and trained as a Conservator of Costume and Textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology. A graduate of Wesleyan University, she earned a master’s degree from FIT, and a Ph.D. in material culture from Boston University.” Here’s a woman who knows pockets and other aspects of attire. 

Tidbits follow, gleaned from Alexandra Jacobs’ “More Than Gum and Coins Are Stuffed in These ‘Pockets,’ The New York Times Book Review, October 15, 2023. Also pocketfuls of insights arose from other sources as well.

At First, Mostly Male Stuff. Alexandra Jacobs observes, “For at least 100 years, American magazines, fiction and art depicted with affectionate wonderment the oddments young lads might Tom Sawyerishly shove into the sides of their pants, from pennywhistles and knives, to marbles and bottle caps, to a live rat or turtle. But not their own hands, authority figures scolded, as this would bring them all too close to the genitals—though such a gesture eventually came to signal ‘insouciance and outlaw cool.’”

Walt Whitman, hand in pocket; frontispiece of Leaves of Grass. This and another image from The New York Times Book Review. 

Jacobs mentions “James Dean and his jeans!” Which reminds me of recent Internet discussion about the little inset pocket unique to this apparel. 

Image from Britannica.

Britannica says, “… designed by Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis in 1873 as a feature of the original ‘waist overalls,’ the small pocket was intended to hold a watch.” Today, it’s more likely to hold thumb drives.

An Orson Welles Tale. In Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles: A Biography, Welles relates a distressing tale of a Todd School lecturer who inveigled his hand into young boys’ pockets for motives other than pedagogical. In time the lecher/lecturer was sacked.

Pocket Sexism. Jacobs notes, “Unlike female kangaroos, human women (and other historically second-class citizens) have always had a harder time securing storage close to their person. Emily Dickinson was one of the few who argued successfully with her dressmaker to get a compartment for pencil and paper. She ‘had a room of her own—and a reliable pocket,’ Carlson writes.”

Fashion sketches from 1936 by Elsa Schiaparelli. 

“Such modifications,” Jacobs recounts, “are rare in America, where the feminine silhouette has been so sacrosanct that even the coats of the Women’s Army Corps in World War II lacked adequate storage. ‘Did even a pack of cigarettes threaten to disfigure the breast, making it lumpy and misshapen, a sort of metaphor for servicemen’s worst fears—that after joining the army, women would no longer be recognizable as women?’ the author wonders.”

Other Literary Pockets. Jacobs recalls, “‘Deceitful men all their 20 pockets aren’t enough for their lies’ Molly Bloom thinks in the final soliloquy of Ulysses…. In her memoir of Susan Sontag, Sigrid Nunez wrote of the older woman perplexed by purses and refusing to carry one.”

On Purses. “But the line between purse and pocket is porous,” Jacobs notes, “which makes for some taxonomic confusion. Handbags can also be legally searched by police, in instances when pockets can’t, and may even serve as weapons (think of the neo-Nazi ambushed by ‘The Woman with the Handbag’ in the famous Swedish photo).”

Future Carry-ons. Jacobs foresees, “As technology advances, any body-adjacent storage seems increasingly antique…. We’re already well on our way to pocketlessness with smartwatches and digital wallets; in the future, maybe we’ll just incline our heads at the door rather than being burdened with keys. In the meantime, if the popular read-it-later app Pocket doesn’t aggregate this article, I’ll eat my hat.”

I suspect that SimanaitisSays doesn’t count. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023