Women’s fashions are controlled by the way men want women to look. Often, oddly enough, gay men. Women have wanted pockets for at least the last fifty years and probably longer. They don’t get them. Refer to my first sentence.
I still struggle to wrap my head around it. Does the CEO of [insert brand here] care more about controlling how women look than he does about doubling his market share and cashing out his stock options at soaring stock prices? Really?
I for one don’t care about a shirt with a pocket because if you bend over everything will fall out, and if you add a button to close it then it isn’t as comfortable to do heavy athletics in. So you can probably blame me for that one.
It is becoming harder to find pants with multiple pockets, though. I never use the back pocket and the two side pockets are not enough to carry electronics, wallet, and keys.
I think you don’t grasp the enormous complexity of the global fashion industry. I mean I don’t either, but it’s not like Farmer Brown refusing to grow the kind of onions that are in demand.
It’s certainly true that I don’t grasp what is complex about making clothing with functional pockets.
Nope - it will never happen. Because pockets aren’t the only thing I want. I also want my clothes to fit. Women’s clothing is not sized like men’s - I might possibly get a choice of three lengths but more commonly only one length is available. So if the item with pockets comes in one length (which will be too long for me) and the ones that come in “short” or “petite” don’t have pockets, I’m going to buy the shorter length even though there aren’t any pockets.
Maybe not - jeans are the one type of pants that I have no problem finding with multiple pockets.
The trick is to make a pocket that is invisible, or at least will not mess up the fit or lines of the garment when people invariably stuff bulky items inside it. Not everything is designed like cargo trousers.
Well, obviously the pocketed line of clothing would have to include a variety of sizes, just like any clothing must include a variety of sizes. Any time the clothing industry comes out with a new feature, functional or decorative, they must make it in the full range of sizes, or a reasonable approximation thereof, if they hope it to sell well. And there have been changes in clothing, so clearly they’re capable of handling that part.
One reason is that it costs more to make an item with pockets versus without. If consumers aren’t buying enough of the pocketed items to cover the cost of adding pockets, manufacturers won’t add that feature. The sales would need have additional profit to not only cover the sewing aspect, but also the design aspect of adding good looking pockets in the clothing line. I’m sure they can just slap on a pocket pretty cheaply, but consumers probably won’t buy that product. Consumers want pockets that look nice and don’t affect the silhouette of the clothing, but that adds a relatively significant amount to the cost of the garment.
One reason that men’s clothes always have pockets is that men generally don’t carry purses or bags. Men need places to put their keys, wallet, phone, etc. Without an external bag, the pockets are a necessary functional aspect to hold all that stuff. Women often have a bag or purse, so their need for pocket is not as essential. It’s more of an optional, nice-to-have feature, which means they aren’t going to mind too much if it’s not there and they’re not going to pay a lot to have them added. Not too many men will buy pants without pockets since they wouldn’t be very functional.
Yeah, my wife pointed this out. 4 pockets, but two are in a bad position, and too shallow. The other two are kinda small, also.
She also noted that the fashion industry doe not make clothes for women, they make clothes for the fashion industry.
Of course, something like 90% of the clothing in the USA is made in China, etc.
There’s a difference between size and length. Women’s pants/skirts/dresses come in lots of sizes but I’ve never seen more than three lengths. I doubt there are any men’s pants that are only available with a 30 inch inseam - but it happens with women’s pants all the time. Dresses and skirts don’t have inseams - but a dress/skirt won’t hit the same place on three women who are 5’1", 5’5" and 5’9".
Sure, the companies are capable of selling different lengths - after all some of the same companies sell men’s pants in five or six or more different lengths. Just because they are capable of selling women’s pants in multiple lengths doesn’t mean they do and I already fairly often have the choice of 1) a design feature I want - like pockets or 2) the correct length and I can’t have both because there aren’t any pants that have pockets and come in the right length. Which is why it will never happen that all the women who want pockets will buy from that one company that makes women’s clothes with pockets - they either won’t sell different lengths or they only sell Misses and Junior sizes or only Women’s sizes
I think the point many are missing is that women’s clothes are not and never were designed for practicality. It’s only recently that there are companies making women’s clothes designed for physical labor. And those are still a very small market share. The whole pocket thing is just part of this cultural norm.
No, we all know that. The question is why. Why, if there is market demand for practical features in women’s clothing, is there no supply? Unmet demand is a business opportunity. It’s not like the garment industry is run by a shadowy cabal that prevents anyone from offering pockets to women.
Or is it???
Anyways, there’s only two possibilities. Either there isn’t actually any unmet demand,in spite of women saying they want pockets their actual spending doesn’t reflect that, or all clothing manufacturers are simply missing this business opportunity, either because they’re tradition-bound misogynists, or they’re idiots, or some combination of the two.
My sister-in-law’s wedding dress designer added a discrete pocket to her dress.
Cellphones for selfies, I guess, was the reason.
In a different but closely related example, my mother and I were once in a shoe store, asking for shoes wide enough not to hurt or damage our feet.
The salesman said (probably not exact wording, but close) ‘we don’t carry any like that because they’d make the feet look large and women wouldn’t buy them.’
He said that to two women who were standing in front of him asking to buy them.
– I note that very often, even when women’s clothing has pockets, the pockets aren’t large enough to hold anything much. And occasionally they’re designed so as to make them useless – openings angled, presumably for style, in such as fashion that anything put in the pocket is likely to fall out.
I’m not sure what they’re thinking. I doubt they’re consciously thinking of controlling women; I suspect the problem is that they’re listening almost entirely to each other, and what they’re telling each other is ‘the clothes won’t look good if we put pockets in them, and if they don’t look good nobody will buy them.’
It’s becoming easier to find cargo pants.
Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if that were true!
Don’t get me started on the total disappearance, since my childhood, not only of combination last shoes, but of women’s/misses/juniors sizing in different shapes, not just different in how large they are.
Other way around. Women are often stuck carrying a bag, because we can’t get decent pockets (at least, those of us who aren’t in a position to, or don’t want to, say to hell with it and live in cargo pants.)
And when they do, they usually also adjust the rise in the same direction as the inseam. I need a short inseam and a long rise.
No, those aren’t the only two possibilities (as if there were ever only two possibilities in something as complex as the global fashion industry…).
An important aspect that I think you’re missing here is that women’s fashion alternatives tend to be provided not so much by one manufacturer versus another, but by one sartorial style versus another.
You as a man are probably thinking in terms of men’s clothing: that is, almost all (western) men wear basically one of the same five or six highly standardized garments all the time (say, jeans, khakis/chinos, dress pants, cargo shorts, sweatpants). So if there’s any specific widely desired feature that a manufacturer could add to one of those garments without significantly changing any of its other standard features, that would make their brand preferable and therefore more men would buy their brand. So adding that feature would be a no-brainer.
Same for shirts. Your shirts are long-sleeve or short-sleeve, roomy-cut or slim-fit, cotton or cotton/poly, woven broadcloth-ish or jersey-knit (or maybe an occasional seersucker weave or linen for the fashionistos among you). You have basically no choices to make in terms of embellishment or design, so it would make total sense to choose among a group of nearly identical garments from different manufacturers based on the one cool feature that one manufacturer thought of adding.
That is not the way women’s fashion works. There are a lot more basic garments (e.g., jeans, khakis/chinos, sweatpants, “man-tailored” dress slacks, palazzo pants, jean skirts, kilts, pencil skirts, circle skirts, A-line skirts, leggings, shirtdresses, tunic dresses, sundresses, and literally dozens of others even before you get into subspecies like the high-low sundress, for example). And they are extremely variable in their basic features, so if you want a specific feature you are usually targeting a particular type of garment rather than a particular brand.
E.g., mainstream styles of women’s jeans and khakis etc. and other casual pants almost universally have pockets. Women to whom pockets are very important tend to skew their wardrobe choices towards those kinds of pants. When they have to wear other kinds of clothing for some reason, they would still prefer to have pockets. But if they can’t find a suitable garment with pockets, they often don’t have the choice to just wear something else instead.
If you have to buy a stylish dress or whatever for your niece’s wedding or whatever, then the manufacturers have far less financial incentive to constrain the design category of “stylish dress” by mandating pockets. You as a purchaser have so many other constraints you’re expected to meet in your choice of dress design—has to be an appropriate style, not horribly unflattering color, silhouette and hemlength and neckline and sleeves that meet your modesty criteria, price point, length and fit that suit your body, fabric and embellishments that are within what you can manage for garment care, and so on and so forth.
If you’re a woman buying a stylish dress, retailers are not going to offer you different brands of stylish dress that are basically identical except that one brand includes pockets and the others don’t. You don’t have anywhere near as much leeway for choosing a garment based solely on one particular design feature as men do.
Men often react to these explanations by looking blank and saying “oh, so what you mean is that women don’t really want pockets, because they’re willing to buy garments without pockets”. Then we have to kill them and throw their bodies in the Salvation Army donations dumpster. Hey, somebody will get some good use out of those Dockers.
This.
It doesn’t matter how much extra variety of types of clothing there are for women, if there is unmet demand for stylish clothes with pockets and clothing manufacturers do nothing to meet that demand, it’s a missed business opportunity and those manufacturers are passing up easy profit. Unless they’ve repeatedly tried making stylish clothes with pockets and they just don’t sell. That would indicate that women don’t really want pockets - choosing style alone over style plus practicality.
And yes, those really are the only two options. Either there isn’t actually a significant unmet demand, or there is. If there is, it’s a missed business opportunity. This is basically a truism in a free market, regardless of whether we’re talking about pockets on dresses, or luxury trim levels on subcompact hatchbacks, or smartphones with small screens, or any other thing that some people say they want but generally aren’t available to purchase.
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Actually the entire post nailed it.
(Avoiding further donations-dumpster jokes bc I don’t want to annoy the mods with technical violations of rules against death threats) Again, what you’re missing is that the immense “extra variety” in women’s clothing, and all the cultural baggage around women’s clothing, means that there are nearly infinitely many other ways for manufacturers to create and meet customer demands. And, of course, manufacturers can’t realistically meet anything like an infinite number of customer demands simultaneously.
The idea that every sale intrinsically demonstrates that the customer is fully satisfied with the purchase is a myth. Manufacturers don’t have to satisfy a specific customer demand if they can figure out other ways of being profitable without satisfying that demand.
Which merely illustrates, yet again, how unrealistically oversimplified “free-market” arguments tend to be. Real markets very often do not behave like ideal theoretical free markets.
Look, put aside the market-fundamentalist dogma (possibly spiked with some inadvertent culturally-imprinted “women are so irrational and don’t know what they want” sexism) and give your brain a chance here. Do you really think that there are no other examples of goods that a lot of people really do want but nonetheless aren’t widely available? How about, for the USans among us, affordable reliable health insurance without a lot of byzantine red tape, for example? How about a wider selection of mainstream movies that aren’t just sequels and/or superhero franchises? And so on.
What you’ve got here is a circular argument where you assume that women must not really want pockets because otherwise manufacturers would provide them because markets by definition provide whatever customers want. This is naive, and all it reveals is that market-fundamentalist “truisms” often do a piss-poor job of describing real-world market realities.