Try to find a pocket in a woman’s dress from the 18th century. You probably won’t, and not because women then had nothing to carry. They did — keys, small purses, smelling salts, sewing kits. The solution was a separate tied pocket, worn beneath the outer skirt, accessed through a slit in the seam. It was hidden, moderately practical, and entirely invisible to the casual observer. Men’s coat pockets, by contrast, were sewn directly into the garment as a matter of course. The asymmetry is almost comically revealing.
Before either arrangement existed, everyone carried things by other means. A belt pouch — a small bag hung from the waist — was the default technology of the ancient and medieval world, used regardless of gender or class. Roman soldiers had them. Medieval merchants had them. The word ‘pocket’ itself derives from the Norman French poque, a small bag or pouch, which entered Middle English as a diminutive of ‘poke’, meaning sack. The transition from external pouch to internal cavity took several centuries and was tied, as so much clothing history is, to changes in tailoring technique.
The Pocket Enters the Coat
Pockets as we now understand them — sewn into the lining of a garment — began appearing in men’s breeches and later coats in the early 17th century. The timing coincides with the consolidation of tailoring as a skilled trade and with the spread of a new kind of object that needed somewhere to live: the pocket watch. First produced in numbers in the late 16th century, pocket watches were expensive, fragile, and spherical — none of which made them easy to hang from a belt. A sewn pocket solved the problem neatly.
Women’s fashion moved in the opposite direction. The wide-hipped silhouettes fashionable in the 17th and 18th centuries made external pocket bags easy to conceal beneath voluminous skirts, and there was little pressure to integrate storage into the garment itself. When the silhouette narrowed dramatically at the end of the 18th century — the high-waisted, column-shaped dress inspired by Neoclassical fashion — even tied pockets became too bulky. Women were left with the reticule, a small handheld bag, as their primary storage option. Men kept their coat pockets. The divergence between men’s and women’s relationship with pockets had begun in earnest.
The 19th and 20th Centuries
Industrial tailoring in the 19th century standardised and multiplied pockets in men’s clothing: breast pockets, ticket pockets, hip pockets, watch pockets (the small extra pocket within the right-hand pocket of trousers, still present on most jeans, that most people now use for nothing in particular). Women’s clothing followed no equivalent logic. Pockets appeared and disappeared with the silhouette, added when the line could absorb them and removed when fashion demanded otherwise.
The 20th century brought women into trousers and, with them, into pockets — but the fashion industry’s relationship with women’s storage remained grudging. The shallow, largely decorative pocket found on many women’s jeans and trousers today is a historical curiosity: a pocket-shaped object that cannot hold a modern smartphone without significant danger. It reflects neither practical need nor engineering limitation but simply the continuation of a very old habit of treating women’s clothing as primarily ornamental.
What a Pocket Actually Is
A pocket is, at its most basic, a decision about whose convenience matters. The history of who got proper pockets and when is a small, thread-by-thread record of whose daily needs were taken seriously by the people designing their clothes. It is a more useful lens than it might first appear.
The good news, if you need it, is that the market has recently noticed the gap. A growing number of women’s clothing brands now advertise functional pockets as a selling point — which says something simultaneously hopeful about the future and slightly absurd about the recent past.