For crying out loud I do not think that women don’t really want pockets! I think that clothing manufacturers are missing an obvious trick because they’re led by traditionalist asshats.
Let me try to rephrase.
If there really is demand for pockets on stylish women’s clothing (and I believe there is based on the responses of women both in this thread and those I’ve spoken to irl), then there is a competitive advantage to be gained in the marketplace by producing clothes that satisfy that demand. That this market is in fact underserved is an instance of market failure. I am not a free market fundamentalist. The free market fails all the damn time. See, for example, your next example of health care, where it fails horribly for numerous reasons, many of which are obvious.
The mystery is why there is a market failure here, because this is a case where the market is largely unfettered, there aren’t any obvious mismatches in incentive structures like in health care, there’s no huge additional cost to adding the supposedly desired features like my luxury subcompact example, and in response to your assertion the extra variety in women’s clothing types and styles makes this all more complicated, I say that the decision to add pockets or not to any specific garment in the design phase is a simple, binary decision. Either you stick a pocket onto that dress, or you don’t. Nothing complicated about it. Applies to a wider array of SKUS, but that’s not really material to the decision about the single design under consideration. And if adding the pocket would increase sales, and you don’t add it despite that because “it would ruin the lines” or whatever, then you’re a bad capitalist and you’re leaving yourself open to the next guy stealing your sales. And the fact that no one else is stealing those sales by sticking pockets onto their offerings means they’re all bad capitalists.
Side note, and not to hijack the thread, but the health care example is a good example of market failure, but not a good counterexample to my ‘if unmet demand, then missed business opportunity’ axiom, because of the weird disconnects in the US health insurance market, where the purchasers of insurance are mostly employers, not the insured, and the actual end product, i.e. health care not health insurance, is not particularly well-suited to the insurance model in the first place because the incentives of the insurer in terms of delivering actual health care do not align with the needs of the insured for receiving it. The US health care market is broken in a bunch of ways, and many of them are very obvious and fairly well explained by standard models of economics.
What makes the pockets issue interesting is that it’s clearly a market failure, but the reasons for that failure are much more mysterious. The barriers to entry in the clothing market are not that high. The costs of adding pockets are not that high. The opportunity to make a killing on marketing more practical while still stylish (or perhaps more properly, still appropriate to be worn in social contexts where women feel they can’t get away with khakis or whatever) seems very high. And yet no one takes advantage of it? Why not? It must be infuriating, because the only plausible reason is that there’s a bunch of misogynistic traditionalist asshats all making the same offensively stupid design decisions, and there’s nothing you can do about it until some market disruptor comes along and actually offers the product you want.