A bit on the side
Just stop for a moment and check your pockets. If you are wearing jeans you probably have at least five. A shirt carries abreast pocket. Fitted trousers have side pockets. A cardigan may well have two patches, three, or four if it's alluding to
Chanel. Even a dress is likely to sport sneaky pockets tucked into the seams, great slabs slapped on the front or dainty
decorative ones just about big enough for a doll's hand. If you managed to leave the house today unaccompanied by pockets,
you are a rarity. Perhaps you broke out in a catsuit. Once, no outfit was complete without a handbag. Now none is complete
without a pocket.
This has been a quiet revolution. Ever since Mulberry launched the infamous Roxanne in October 2003, handbags have been
growing in price and size, their increasingly ferocious hardware glinting in our hands like giant knuckle dusters. It is a
trend that seemed to reach a self-regarding peak in spring 2007 when Louis Vuitton issued a ￡23,484 bag comprised of segments
of all its recent successful bags. Then in March last year, just 12 months on, the tide turned. The consumer research
specialist Mintel forecast an 18% fall in sales growth in the luxury sector. Brief, sheepish asides about the end of the "It"
bag have peppered Vogue, although the sensitivities of its advertisers have deterred it from nailing the demise. At the
autumn/winter catwalks few or no handbags appeared on such diverse runways as Givenchy, Versace and Balenciaga. Instead,
models sauntered along with hands dug deep into the folds of their clothes. The London designer Louise Gray showed a black
shift on which the multicoloured utility pockets were so large they looked as if they were holding the dress hostage. The
pockets had become the protagonist.
"I'm obsessed with pockets," says Anita Borzyszkowska, of Gap, a store that has been at the forefront of the pocket revival
on the high street, from hoodie-style pouches on sweater dresses to Chanel-style patches on cardigans and invisible slips
sewn into the side seams of dresses. Borzyszkowska - whose personal pocket tally for the day is seven (jeans plus a
boyfriend-style cardigan) - cites Gap's collaboration two years ago with the designer Roland Mouret as the turning point. His
collection of 10 dresses, much lauded at launch for its jolliness of colour and blousy styling, was in fact conceived with
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something else in mind. "One of the goals," says Borzyszkowska, "was for everything to have a pocket."
This is not as offbeat as it sounds. Look back at the headline trends of the past few years and pockets emerge as the common
factor. The peg-leg was widely heralded as this season's trouser shape but it fulfils its true jodhpur-like silhouette only
when its pockets are puffed out with hands. The trapeze dress, the frock of summer 2007, swung with ease when propelled by
hands in pockets.
Secreted in the folds of fashion history, pockets seem to offer an inside take on the way we dress. In their tiny dimensions
huge changes have been conveyed. Coco Chanel's trademark jackets in the 30s caused such a storm because they incorporated
conspicuous pockets - for centuries associated only with men's dress - and thereby promised to liberate women with sporty
practicality. Such was their power that when Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of US Vogue, started work on the magazine
in 1937, she turned up in "a little Chanel shirt with pockets inside", and told a colleague she had had "the best idea. We're
going to eliminate all handbags . . . and do the whole magazine just showing what you can do with pockets". She didn't -
because her then editor explained how handbag advertising worked - but by the time of the second world war, women's pockets
were everywhere, heavily buttoned, bucket-like numbers with utility flaps or slouchy pouches that bagged out the fronts of
dungarees.
In the 50s, the presence of pockets gave refuge to hands that sought elegance by perching on the hip: without the pocket the
decade might not have acquired its defining posture, the arm bent like an arrowhead, elbow sharpened. In the 60s, giant
pockets helped to make Mary Quant's minis even more miniature, while models on 80s runways would often be seen with their
thumbs hanging out of theirs, a style feature - surely the only one - that today unites Prince Charles and Alexa Chung.
"Pockets are a tiny, slight thing in terms of world importance but they are a very sensitive barometer about how we feel
about the world and our possessions and how we feel about our bodies," says Barbara Burman, a pocket expert who has curated
an exhibition on the subject at the Fashion Museum in Bath. "Having your hands in your pockets has social and moral
connotations." The front pockets of any brand of blue jeans have changed little since the 50s, but the way we wear them, the
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turn of the thumb, the sag of the arm, makes revelations. That is why, when Bob Dylan buries his hands deep in his jeans,
shoulders hunched, on the cover of the Freewheelin' album, he looks as if he's scuffing along his own path, solitary even
with Suze Rotolo at his side; yet 40 years later when George Bush, in an almost identical outfit of tawny jacket, blue shirt
and belted jeans, tucks his thumbs into his pockets, he looked as if he is feeling for his holster. Few items of dress can
convey such hardship and such wealth, such alienation and power.
So why are pockets proliferating now?
Burman, whose experience in the field dates back to the 50s when she had a pocket on the front of her gym knickers (for her
handkerchief), thinks our pockets are multiplying because we need to find an increasing number of places for all the
technology we have to carry. Harriet Quick, the fashion feature director of Vogue, believes pockets make the wearer feel more
relaxed - "not casual, but easier". A pocket, she says, gives you insouciance. It fits with the current dress-down mood, and
when you're standing at a party with one hand holding a drink and the other feeling awkward, it can find its place in a
pocket, fiddle with a lipstick, flip a coin.
And, of course, as the credit crisis worsens and shoppers retreat from the idea of spending a small fortune on a handbag, it
fits that the most appropriate refuge for overspending hands might be the stillness and sanctuary of a pocket. If our
economic self-consciousness continues, the chances are those pockets will have little inside them but at least we will all
look insouciant.
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