Pockets by Hannah Carlson

Author:Hannah Carlson [Carlson, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 1. Christian Dior day suit, photograph by Arik Nepo, published in “The News in Paris,” Vogue, March 15, 1949. With his “calla-lily pockets” Dior helped the “pocket theme” dominate the spring Paris collections in 1949.

CHAPTER 6 Pocket Play:

Designing for “Doubly Decorative Value”

Is it true, as Christian Dior claimed in 1954, that “men have pockets to keep things in, women for decoration”? If so, it is a phenomenon Dior actively helped to perpetuate. In the ten short years of his career before his early death in 1957, the fashion press often called out a dramatic pocket embellishment as “unmistakably Dior.” Some Dior pockets were pointy and “whisked out beyond the shoulders” like wings in flight. His “kangaroo pockets” flopped high over the breasts rather disconcertingly, while his “calla-lily pockets” were petal shaped and rose up to the shoulders, jutting forward in a scrolling arch (figure 1). Whether set high under the slope of the clavicle or sharply angled along the hips, these gestural pockets helped stress some feature of the silhouette Dior hoped to accentuate. Very few, however, could carry much more than a pretty handkerchief.

In early twenty-first-century discussions of the gendered politics of pockets, Dior’s witticism has made the rounds. Cited in articles and gallery-wall texts, it identifies differing design motives at work in men’s and women’s wear. The quip condenses what we sense to be generally true: that men’s clothes are made for utility and women’s for beauty. Dior’s own work confirms that this was the case for women’s wear in the 1950s, and a cursory survey of pocketing after the eighteenth century would have given him all the evidence needed to confirm that men’s wear, in contrast, had not much bothered itself with decorative effects. Men’s pockets have not jutted out spectacularly, drooped suggestively, or been made to mimic wings or calla lily petals. They have tended not to refer to other objects or involve jokes, mimicry, or trompe l’oeil. Resolutely straightforward, their form has followed their function.

Yet as with any pithy pronouncement, one does well to interrogate it. It is possible that Dior exaggerated the lack of whimsy in pockets that adorn clothing designed for men. Also possible: that Dior failed to acknowledge the cultural work that ornamental pockets can perform—that ornament can act as a vehicle through which to express aesthetic propositions and ideas. (Analogies and jokes, after all, challenge wearers and viewers to see things in a new way.) In fact pockets have participated in fashion’s imaginative projects with increasing exuberance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and this has been the case in women’s wear, men’s wear, and gender-agnostic clothing. As art historian Ann Hollander observed, sensible aspects of clothing are “no sooner put into use than put into play.”

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