Last week, I purchased a new pair of jeans through the magical world of online shopping. Now, jeans are a very complex piece of clothing that have to fit perfectly in all the right places. Purchasing jeans without trying them on runs the high risk of staring at your behind for approximately seven-and-a-half minutes and stretching to estimate the danger of butt-crack exhibition.
However, I trusted my judgment.
Sure enough, the jeans fit. I patted myself on the back for the brilliant decision I had made and slid my hands into the nonexistent pockets. As in, pockets that were not there. Nonmaterial pockets. Pockets that should have theoretically been where my hands were reaching, but they weren’t. I searched for them for a good five minutes, rubbing my hips and picking at the fabric until I arrived to a shocking conclusion: all four pockets on the jeans were fake.
With disgust and disbelief, I sat down in these hip, yet useless denim leg tubes and asked Uncle Google: Why don’t women’s pants have pockets?
Uncle Google spit out 2,640,000 results in 0.46 seconds. Blogs, Yahoo Answers and one article from The Atlantic all sprung up to educate me. Considering the impracticality of low-rise pants that leave a caesarean-section scar on my stomach after I eat, the six-inch stilettos that my mom gifted me with in 2012 in the back of my closet, bras that cover only one tenth of my chest and those despicable fake pockets, the consensus is quite clear—the fashion industry hates women.
Despite 70 percent of fashion institute graduates being female, the fashion industry remains male-dominated. While male fashion designers claim themselves to be “imaginative” and “innovative,” female designers are stereotyped as the “practical” ones in a pejorative way. Because real pockets, or jeans that don’t expose one’s underwear upon bending over or sweaters that actually warm one up rather than look cute, are just not in.
Women are being blamed for choosing design over practicality when the latter was never even an option. If it were, you wouldn’t catch me dead carrying my phone and keys in my bare hands. This is a call to all aspiring designers. Give everything pockets, make bank.
Krokova is a member of the class of 2019.
