Less inflammatory but more technically correct - Woman's Pockets Reveal That Women Do Not Value Putting Things In Their Pockets.
It stretches credulity, given the control women stereotypically have over clothing decisions, that large-pocketed clothes would not be an option if there was demand. Evidence suggests that any demand is a vocal minority.
Individual women have very little control over the clothing that they can buy.
As an exercise, go to any mall or shopping center and try to find a pair of women's jeans that meet the following criteria:
1. Decent quality material, is not deliberately pre-destroyed
2. Functional pockets, but not outlandish 90s style cargo pockets
3. Cut with a straight lower leg, not flared or tapered "skinny", and a proportional leg overall, not extra-wide or skinny
4. A waist size that doesn't assume the wearer is an athlete with a flat stomach (remember, women's pants are sized by number, not by waist x length), even in a "curvy" fit
5. Is not purpose-designed hiking gear
If you can find anything meeting all 5 criteria, I will pay you a $50 finder's fee and consider booking a trip to visit your fair city, because my wife would be thrilled to know they exist.
Revealed preference only ever makes sense when interpreted as preference among available options, not preference among all possible options.
> Evidence suggests that any demand is a vocal minority
The demand for any one individual improvement is probably a relatively vocal minority. There are so many busted messed up attributes about women's clothing that it's hard to choose any one of them to be vocal about. So the overall effect is diluted.
That, and, a lot of women are probably just used to carrying their stuff in a handbag and don't even realize that decent pockets could be an option. Likewise for the unnecessary forced selection between super skinny and super wide jeans.
I haven't carried a purse since my teens and it's absolutely a struggle to find a pair of pants that values function over some dumb designer's idea of fashionable style. I'm pretty sure it's the designers who want women to have smooth lines unbroken by practical things like keys, and underwear.
Whenever I find a pair of jeans that are, as you described, straight leg, 4 pockets of a size large enough to fit my phone comfortably and my wallet (yes I use a men's slim wallet), not sparkly or embroidered, I will buy a half dozen and pray my weight won't change too much. (Asking for a good fabric in top of that is just too much now.)
> If you can find anything meeting all 5 criteria, I will pay you a $50 finder's fee and consider booking a trip to visit your fair city, because my wife would be thrilled to know they exist.
Is it possible that your criteria is not possible? If it is possible, buy a vacation to Bangladesh or India, and go to one of the many fabric stores. They have people who can design and make literally make whatever clothes you want. It won’t be $50, but it would be affordable for many in the US.
The question is, is it worth sufficiently more than the $30 clothes that clothes sellers are betting will appeal to a much more broad audience?
>Revealed preference only ever makes sense when interpreted as preference among available options, not preference among all possible options.
In the case of clothing, especially women’s clothing, surely the available options comes close to all possible options, especially after all these decades. Carrying smartphones has been ubiquitous for 10+ years, surely someone in the supply chain has personally (or their spouse) experienced the need for bigger pockets.
> buy a vacation to Bangladesh or India, and go to one of the many fabric stores. They have people who can design and make literally make whatever clothes you want
Yes, clearly. That's a reasonable thing to suggest /s
If there is meaningful demand, the idea is worth quite a lot of money. Starting a business to capitalise on it is a reasonable suggestion. I know a girl who started her own underwear line, she'd be happy to do pants I'm sure.
The issue is that the meaningful demand is not there, or already filled and the market is just small. As nerdponx observed, it isn't really about pockets. There are 4 different other concerns that probably outrank pockets and that is just specific to his wife. And she might not even buy the things when she sees them. When I buy pants, I literally just buy a long pair of pants with the most and largest pockets. I dunno what the name for them is, tradesmen wear them. Cargo pants? They carry a lot of cargo. That in a nutshell is why male pants get pockets and womans pants don't.
Still that minority is not being served.
Reminds me of small powerful smart phones being almost extinct. I have heard the complaint so often now, but it seems the majority wouldn't want smaller phones.
Contrary to small phones though, big pocket pants seem like something you could produce without much investment. But then you could not compete with the pricing of big cheap brands and I assume that makes the market situation as is: it's too niche for mass taste and the niche is not willing to invest more money.
I am wondering how many women just buy pants made for men to get bigger pockets?
The problem is the length in men's trousers which doesn't fit shorter women. But yes, I have 'mens' hoodies and other items which tend to have great big pockets...
And this isn't limited to jeans. If you take an average hiking coat men's ones also have more and better pockets to women's. And we do not take handbags on hikes.
Even as a cis man, a lot of men's clothing doesn't fit me. It all seems to be cut for skinny rock climbers, with slim chests, broad shoulders, and long limbs. The brands that aren't, are cut for people shaped like meatballs. I've just accepted that all my clothes cost extra to get them tailored.
I mean as a man who identifies as a man I prefer women’s jeans to men’s jeans because the fabric is lighter and less restricting. So I just buy women’s jeans the pocket size does not effect my purchase decision the comfort factor does. I imagine women could do the reverse if their purchase decision is based on pocket size.
"I would like a micro car, but would like the glovebox to be slightly bigger"
"Not a problem, just buy a pick-up truck instead"
Cargo pants are not the same as jeans with larger pockets, nor is changing to mens clothing the same as getting larger pockets in the womens option, which tend to have different shapes and available sizes.
I don't know about your country, but in mine cargo pants are ridiculed by women, even more than short sleeve shirts (supposedly you need to roll up the sleeves of long-sleeved shirts). There is no way they would wear cargo pants. A small minority in certain scenarios - maybe. Women in general - no way.
Which doesn't fit. And not everyone priorotizes functionality over looks. And that women have an issue whem it comes to trouser pockets here is rather well known, and not a voluntary choice according to most women I know.
Choice only reflects preference when sufficient choices are available (in this case, having common options with large pockets), and that making a selection based on preference in that area does not require significant downgrades on other areas (having a cargo pants option is not sufficient if the user is looking for skinny jeans with larger pockets).
Fashion is always on the move, vacillating through a range of possibilities in a way that rhymes with previous periods. And yet, certain invariants seem to hold or dominate over time and space.
I bet that if large pockets were introduced, women would express either indifference or select against them. (Anecdotally, I asked a woman whether she'd want larger pockets, and she responded that she doesn't like pockets at all, and doesn't like having anything in them when they are there.)
The belief women's pockets are inferior because they're smaller sounds to me like a boneheaded presumption that completely ignores the difference in needs, body shape, and preferences between the sexes, a kind of boorish and blinded egalitarianism. You wouldn't say that the wool dress pants a lawyer might wear are inferior to jeans because construction workers can't use them during work. That's just pure fallacy. The purposes that each is made for is different. The purpose is the measure, and there are different purposes.
You are assuming that you know better than the experts who design and decide what clothes to sell. Those experts are sometimes wrong, yes, but not that often, you need really good arguments to convince us that you know better than them.
If everyone needs jeans, and everyone makes jeans with small pockets, everyone will buy jeans with small pockets and make the analytics show that the market is satisfied and profit targets are met.
These "experts" only maximize for their own preferred design and target profits. The fact that womens pockets are ridiculously small has become a meme is a good indication that they are wrong and do not care.
Surely, if seamstresses agree, then selling women’s clothes with bigger/more pockets is not a novel idea.
And making clothes with bigger/more pockets does not require a high barrier to entry, the technology has been there for decades.
And profit margins on clothes are tiny, so it stands to reason that sellers would be looking for any edge they can get to sell more clothes and/or at a higher price.
If you agree with the above, then there are two options:
1) for decades, people whose livelihood is selling clothes have missed an obvious opportunity to earn more money
2) people whose livelihood is selling clothes have not been able to succeed in selling women’s clothes with bigger/more pockets
If option 1, then someone needs to jump into this business. I sympathize with my wife and daughter who also complain about the lack and size of pockets, but I am not sure how to square that with the above parameters. Maybe it is an under-explored business opportunity, but it is so low barrier to entry that it seems unbelievable that the answer is not sufficient lack of demand (option 2).
Asked a close friend of mine who is a female seamstress. Their opinion on the matter:
1. The popular brands are run by men who do not understand and/or agree with the issue.
2. The large manufacturers as they have favorable supply deals, and threaten suppliers to not sell to competitors at the risk of losing their business, resulting in lack of affordable materials to build competing businesses.
The former being the reason for the current bias in options, and the latter explaining why there is no fair market for alternative options.
I find that hard to believe. Chairman at Zara is a woman, CEO of gap was a woman for at least 2020 to 2022, CEO of H&M is a woman.
> 1. The popular brands are run by men who do not understand and/or agree with the issue.
What is there to understand? Bigger pockets fit more things. It is physics.
It is possible, but I doubt a man leading a clothing company is deciding against making more money by selling clothes with bigger pockets due to a philosophy of believing women’s clothes should not have pockets.
Given the option of earning more money or preventing women from having more or bigger pockets, surely every single leader in the clothing business is not going to forego more money.
> Given the option of earning more money or preventing women from having more or bigger pockets
There is no market force that would decease revenue from not changing existing products unless another but manufacturer does it first and attracts customers away.
> The fact that womens pockets are ridiculously small has become a meme is a good indication that they are wrong and do not care.
This isn't true, it can be a meme anyway if women prefer the looks of small pockets they wont even consider the larger pocketed one, and we end up in the current situation.
It isn't hard to find clothes with larger pockets, it is hard to find clothes women like with larger pockets.
Obviously, otherwise you wouldn't look at a thread about women's fashion on a start up tech forum. Everyone here clicked it since they want to see what start up tech people think about women's fashion.
Also, small creators enter the market all the time.
If some indie brand was seeing huge demand selling women's clothes with large pockets, the mainstream brands would hop on the bandwagon in a heartbeat.
People like to try on pants, and people who just want normal pants with functional pockets are the LAST people you'd expect to be looking through niche clothing boutiques lol. Not to mention custom clothes are super expensive.
I know you can go to India and pick out fabrics and have them make custom clothing, but you might be able to find someone online these days. For example, I searched “custom clothing india” and came up with these:
You don't understand, they want to both eat their cake and keep it. They want large pockets, but they also refuse to wear clothes they find ugly, and they find large pockets ugly, hence they wont find any clothes with large pockets since they filter them out before even considering it.
But of course if you ask them if they magically want larger pockets they say yes. I'd also want magical pants.
I was not aware of a democratic vote by women on the state of their pockets?
IMHO you have it backwards. The women that control clothing decisions are a small minority of all women. I bet if you polled women you’d find a majority that would favor larger pockets.
>The women that control clothing decisions are a small minority of all women.
The apparel/garment industry is highly fragmented with a low barrier-of-entry. It's not as "top-down" as your sentence seems to be implying. There are plenty of how-tos on the web explaining how to turn your clothing designs into products using contract manufacturers in China etc. That's why amateur Youtube influencers with no experience in the garment industry can "launch" their own clothing lines.
It seems that if "women's pants with bigger pockets" was desired by enough potential buyers to be profitable, some entrepreneurs would already have taken advantage of that arbitrage opportunity and become rich.
I agree with the sibling comment[1] that women may prefer bigger pockets if that one characteristic was isolated -- but they also prioritize other aspects such as the "look" the pants that end up forcing smaller pockets. Women's clothing is often a prime example of form-over-function (as a deliberate tradeoff) rather than function-over-form.
There is a reason we don't expect commercial decisions to be made by poll - consumers are outrageous liars. You can poll consumers and they'll say all sorts of things that turn out to clearly not be true based on their in store choices.
If we conducted a poll of 50 women, we might well find most of them say they want pants with bigger pockets. If you start a big-pocket line of womans clothing, you'll probably sell a lot less than someone who tries alternate tactics. Or make a fortune, what do I know. But if anyone believes there is a fortune to be made they can go try that remarkably easily and yet small pockets persist.
Calling them liars is a bit much in this scenario. I would blame the poll more than the person answering the poll. If I ask you: do you want a Porsche? You might say yes, but if i say: i can give you a Porsche for a million. You will probably say no.
They should probably ask a more nuanced question around what kind of trade-offs people would be willing to make for those bigger pockets.
Femininity as a concept is rooted in patriarchal oppression, but because people are brainwashed and pressured into it, they actively want it, so it's not a problem.
Women against burkas or female circumcision are also vocal minorities in parts of the world too.
I usually don't look at my wife's trouser pocket when ironing them. Even if I did, I am not wearing them, so impossible for me to tell if they are sufficiently sized for her. And cross dressing is a no-go, I simply don't fit even fit up to my knees in those jeans of hers.
All too true...but you'll need to develop a serious business plan, pitch deck, etc. to get any VC funding for your new "Equal Pockets" clothing line and web store.
I'd suggest starting with some market research. The clothing industry is said to be pretty responsive to customer demand, with fairly low barriers to entry. Why aren't your future competitors already cashing in on this problem?
The problem is, that people want one thing then buy another. I'm a guy, i want pockets, more pockets, even more pockets, and I bought cargo pants once, but actually putting all the stuff in the pockets makes them really heavy. I also want a tiny laptop (think GPD pocket), but working on that really sucks... I also want a huge 19" laptop as a desktop replacement, but where would I actually carry that?
There are womens clothes with pockets, also womens cargo pants exist, but in the end, most women buy other stuff, and most non-specialized stores sell stuff that women (..well, and men) buy the most.
You're missing the point and talking about something different.
Women, believe it or not, are just like men, in that they are human beings.
As human beings, women (just like men!) have a variety of competing preferences that all must be balanced in the presence of a limited budget set.
It's totally possible to find women's pants with big pockets. It's also possible to find women's pants made of high-quality materials. Furthermore, it's possible (if you browse carefully) to find women's pants that have a relatively neutral straight cut, but still fit nicely around the hips, thighs, buttocks, and waist.
What's broadly impossible is to actually find all three of those characteristics in the same pair of pants. If you buy pants at H&M, they might fit how you want, but they are going to fall apart. If you buy pants at Marshall's, they won't look good and they might still fall apart. If you buy pants at Madewell, they are cut assuming the wearer is a scrawny teenager, unless you specifically size up into the "plus" category. Etc etc.
What's also borderline impossible is to find pants that fit in both waist and leg length if your body proportions are not that of a limited prescribed set, because women's pants are not sold according to separate waist and leg sizes. But that's a separate issue. It actually exemplifies the problem here, but that first requires us to think about adult women as adult conscious intelligent human people and not as abstract instinct-driven chimpanzee-like entities. So let's not go there.
The overarching problem as I see it is that there are no women's pants that are just normal pants. There's always something funky about them.
Remember, I'm not just talking about knockaround faded blue jeans. Pants are worn for a variety of reasons. Go to any urban downtown area and look at the men who look like they're on their way to work. Several of them will probably be wearing high-end selvedge denim or twill chinos. The lower leg will be straight and slim, landing more or less at the correct location at the top of the shoe. The thigh and seat will be fitted comfortably but not baggy. The material is sturdy and high-quality. There is no unnecessary wear applied to the pants, no feathering, no tears at the bottom edge, no holes at the knees. The pockets will be standard size, big enough for the wearer's oversize iPhone XQBERT 45 with 6 cameras in one pocket, and their tactical EDC card clip in the other. They will likely also have some kind of shoulder bag or backpack, revealing that they do in fact desire to carry items that don't fit in a standard pocket.
Find me a pair of pants like that in a cut appropriate for a woman's hip/thigh/seat proportions, and I'll pay you a finders fee, because my wife would be very interested in purchasing them.
Just give cardboard purses to persons from highly cultural cities through cultural events, your enemy is the so called 'tote bag'. cardboard purses should be disposable, solid enough to transport something (e.g. some book the person bought) from a museum to the person house, but fragile enough to last only one week or so, IMPORTANT : the purse should be "cool" enough so people will prefer this to let's say the usual paper bag you get at the grocery store.
Then, when you have taken the place of the tote bag, you can build the start-up that will manufacture and sell real purses, which will prove useful due to the downsizing of the men pockets, to transport phones, books, and coin purses.
This was extremely common with a certain category of youngsters when i was in school. The guys would all have these kind of sports outfit and all have a small bag like this:
Haha spot on! Being a European myself, I always find it funny what Americans think European is. Apparently we're all nudists or wearing Borat bikinis, everybody is apparently into swinger lifestyle, and we're all dressed like we came out of a French fashion magazine.
I've noticed a lot of 'fashionable' young men carrying those small bags that hang diagonally across the chest or back. Seems like the man purses are having a moment.
That doesn't track unless it's all part of a monopoly. Absent monopoly, you'd likely already have a company doing this and making money. I can't not believe that the some companies didn't do market research on this.
I've heard many women complain over the years about the small pockets, but my assumption (possibly very wrong) is that they might not buy a pair of jeans if giving them full sized pockets made them significantly less fashionable (i.e. they'd get less utility out of them).
> I've heard many women complain over the years about the small pockets
Talk to those women and they will admit there are many clothes for women with pockets, just that those doesn't look as good so they are searching hard for good looking clothes with pockets which basically doesn't exist. They rather buy clothes they like without pockets than clothes they find ugly with pockets.
The amount of men here explaining to women why their lack of good choices is their own fault is depressing. I suppose I needed a reminder that just because it's the 2020s doesn't mean people have advanced beyond the arrogance of ignorance.
That is a false characterization of the discussion.
The specific claim is the low supply or even total lack of women’s clothing with bigger pockets is a reflection of the desires of the market as a whole, not specifically about pocket size, but the entire garment being purchased. This claim is because making and selling women’s clothing with bigger pockets is trivial, so the deduction is that the sellers have experienced insufficient demand if they are not offering it.
The other option is sellers have not picked up on an opportunity to sell a more competitive product, which might be true if buying tastes have changed.
I think you can add another criteria that certain commenters here have revealed. They usually also say that they do not want to scour the web for a pair of pants that has larger pockets (see example comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38000006). This means you also have to add convenience to the list of criteria.
I would classify small startups as more inconvenient which might in part explain why they struggle to fill this niche.
It's worth making clear that "convenience" in this case is really more like "not expending relatively large amounts of time, energy, and money".
Characterizing that as "convenience" seems demeaning to me, unless we also consider it a convenience that I don't need to fetch my water from a well or light a fire to take a warm bath.
Convenience was the closest word I could find to express it at the time. Maybe I should have said accessible instead. I did not want to imply a positive or negative connotation to it. I thought it useful to expand the list of criteria to add that women will also value the level of accessibility.
True, to some degree. OTOH - neither "men" nor "women" are tightly coordinated and cohesive teams, and not every imperfection in the world is the fault of men.
I figured out fairly young that any disagreements or drama between my female relatives were their business, not mine, and it was generally wisest to make myself scarce for the duration.
The lack of workable pockets comes down to women's morality. After all, doesn't the free market offer exactly what is demanded? The option must be there, women just don't choose it because they think it's ugly. Women are never socially punished for looking frumpy, obviously. Women are also responsible for the actions of the fashion industry.
Yes, in a normal thread people wouldn't argue that a highly competitive market fails to sell products the consumer would like even though those products are easy to make. But when you start to talk about women all rationality goes out the window and now people suddenly believe the people who sell products are total idiots.
That's such a ridiculously oversimplified take on how the modern economy/clothing industry works it's almost childish. Markets aren't magic, and there are lots of reasons customers wouldn't get what they want.
Not to mention, my default stance is to simply believe people when they tell me what they want - you should try it sometime. With that in mind, even if you want to hold on to your weird market utopia fantasy, it certainly seems like there must be a sizeable minority of people who want (and, anecdotally, who DO go out of their way to find when possible) pants with functional pockets.
"That's what the market sells so it's what you must want" is such a wild take.
> my default stance is to simply believe people when they tell me what they want
That is even more childish though, we know for sure that people don't really know what they want. What is available is a much better predictor for what people want than what they say they want.
Peoples opinions are a valuable input, but it isn't the most important. Expert decisions that considered peoples opinions among many other things are a much better signal.
Oh, bullshit. Yes, people are irrational in lots of ways, but on such a simple thing, where I personally know people who search for pants with more reasonable pockets (or even modify the pockets on the jeans they find, since they're sometimes just sewed shut), it is transparent to me that your impulse to trust "the magic jeans experts" is indefensible.
There are a limited number of retailers in a space where many like to try on the product. There are only a handful of major brands. It is cheaper to make and sell fewer SKUs. Style and fashion are driven by relatively few individual people.
Sure, it's obvious that some (perhaps many?) either like or don't care about the bad pockets. It's also transparently the case that if there are not readily available alternatives, still more will buy the products anyway.
It is also transparently obvious that this can and does result in sizeable numbers of unhappy consumers who want what they claim - better pockets.
You trying to simplify that with "women actually DO want shitty pockets" is absolutely wild.
Those pants looks like they have good pockets, and they aren't cargo pants. Pockets for women are trivial to find, I found them instantly!
So the problem isn't "women's clothing doesn't have pockets", the problem is "the clothes I like doesn't have pockets". If women wanted pockets they could go buy pants with pockets, but they choose not to.
Well those are dress pants and not jeans, but more importantly the existence of an example online doesn't contribute anything. Nobody is claiming that pockets don't exist lol, just that they're often not available in regular stores with any regularity.
I think I've also reached my limit of interest in discussing pockets.
> the existence of an example online doesn't contribute anything
It sure does, H&M is massive and available all over the world. Them having cheap pants with pockets means that women all over the world can easily access pants with pockets.
If women craved pockets so much then those pants would sell out and they would expand the offering with more kinds.
It's childish and unrealistic but it's actually consistent with the prevailing HN attitude in just about any thread where economics shows up.
We need a variant of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect where individuals are eager to forget that they are themselves not experts in the topic at hand, and are therefore unqualified to evaluate a large variety of statement and scenarios.
The quality of HN discussion is dismal in most subjects outside of very narrow subjects (such as software development).
On most other things - i.e.: economics, politics, social issues, history, et cetera and so forth - it's a parade of bad takes from people that obviously think very highly of themselves, but are actually pretty dumb.
Economics in particular is seen as a reputable subject based on numbers, math, resources, and Big Important Decisions.
One problem: human economics are based on human psychology, a subject which is in its infancy. In fact, some who look up to economics look down on psychology.
Actual economic experts are doing the equivalent to "making shit up" since we know so little about psychology. It's all very backward.
> The lack of workable pockets comes down to women's morality.
Which comment? Most are discussing supply and demand.
> The option must be there, women just don't choose it because they think it's ugly.
The option is there, albeit expensive. Travel to a developing country with a reputation for making clothes and for a few thousand dollars, I am guessing you can get custom clothes with bigger pockets made for you.
These are all morality based statements. They hold a moral value. Other comments build on these assumptions to discuss supply and demand.
> Travel to a developing country with a reputation for making clothes and for a few thousand dollars, I am guessing you can get custom clothes with bigger pockets made for you.
Your solution is "have money and take advantage of developing labor." That's not helpful.
These are shoddy incomplete economic arguments because they focus exclusively on demand, treating supply as some highly reactive all-knowing pants creation engine. If women really wanted better pockets, they would magically become widely available at reasonable prices!
Of course, if you look at the actual context of those comments, relatively little of it attempts to invoke anything beyond a cursory nod to that particular anti-economic solecism. It really is largely about blaming women for not making better choices.
> If women really wanted better pockets, they would magically become widely available at reasonable prices!
This is not accurate. There are multiple variables in play. Price, functionality, desirability (to others), etc.
The claim is that across all those variables, what major retailers sell for the lowest prices available is what the broader population of women are able and willing to pay for. Note that the lowest prices require economies of scale, which means the type of clothing that a broad population will accept, even with features they do not like.
It is publicly known that selling clothes is a very low profit margin business, so it stands to reason that unless you know what you are doing, you are not going to survive.
The thing with clothes is that many are not able or willing to pay for the customizations they seek. Because clothes are “easy” to make, the only question is how much are you willing to pay.
I hope that the above website and other discussions around this issue spur clothes makers to make clothes with bigger and more pockets for women at lower prices. Perhaps times are changing and bigger/more pockets is a more profitable market that has not yet been tapped.
Any human economic system is intrinsically tied to human values (and human nature). What we value depends on our moral systems. Discussing economics involves making assumptions about what other people value and why they value it.
> The clothes in Costco and pretty much every other store in America take advantage of developing labor.
Yes, that is generally what you need to trade for other people’s time. An option that lets you trade less money, but more time, is watching YouTube videos on how to sew and making your own clothes.
Examples 1, 2, and 4 are value based statements, nothing about morals at all. Examples 4 comes close, but it's really just saying "women value form over function" using different words, so it's a repeat of example 2.
Claiming that a group values good looking pants over pants with pockets isn't an appeal to morals.
We trust the experts instead of random anecdotes. In this case the experts thinks that women prefer clothes without noticeable pockets, so that is what they sell.
Can you explain why you think the experts are wrong and your hunch is right?
What experts? All the women posting in this thread telling you they want bigger pockets and can't find pants they have bigger pockets?
Those are the only experts worth listening to: the actual people affected by these decisions!
Yours is precisely the same twisted illogic that prevents progress on a whole variety of economic and social issues.
As an extreme but hopefully illustrative case, consider that the people who listened to the "experts" on the topic of smoking tobacco in the first half of the 20th century had a substantially elevated probability of dying from lung cancer or heart disease.
Women doesn't have to listen to men on this, if there is massive demand then they can make a startup and get rich. Many women have already tried that, you would have to explain to me why all of those failed to give women pockets if demand for it was so massive.
It being a meme doesn't mean that women doesn't prefer the looks of small pockets. What they want is to have the looks of small pockets but still have large pockets, that is really hard to satisfy.
If the experts think that women are objects whose main purpose is to be pretty to satisfy the men's eyes, and as such, they need clothes more pretty than useful, then maybe we should not listen to them :)
No one is forcing you (or women) to listen to “them”. Women have long been leaders in the clothes design business. And if I were to guess, leaders in the business probably care more about earning more money rather than subjugating women so that they satisfy men’s eyes.
Sorry, but it's a bit naive on how fashion works. A few people decide what trend is going to be, then they have enough communication power (via media, "stars", social media, etc) to brainwash everyone into thinking they absolutely need to look like to this standard. It's key for the fashion industry to work this way, so that they can change the standard every 6 months and sell more things.
I think women are do more analysis than just buying what is being pushed via advertising.
Also, I see women (and men) wearing many different styles every day, so not sure how effective your supposed fashion cabal is. Just dropping the kids off at daycare, there must be at least 4 or 5 distinct looks just amongst the women in their 20s.
I'm sure the fashion cabal as you say is able to come with a bunch of different looks every 6 months. Of course everyone is more or less sensitive to these stuff, but overall it works extremely well (and if like me, you think "this stuff doesn't work at all in me, I don't give a shit about clothes", be sure that someone in the cabal have thought of you and decided what people who don't give a shit would wear too)
Fishing vests arent standard piece of clothing more along the lines of sporting equipment than garment. As for cargo pants generally only easy to find for one sex and often (though not always) found grouped with garments made especially for physical labour rather than casual wear like other pants like jeans or slacks. And are treated as objects of derision by those that fallow fashion.
Really? Clearly some people enjoy scroll driven animations as a stylistic choice and you’re given a warning and a chance to opt out and you still complain?
It's not clear that some people enjoy scroll driven animations. Why is it to you?
Why not voice if you dislike something even if you can opt out with extra clicks?
"See that guy over there?" she says as she gestures toward a man wearing very short, very tight, cut-off jean shorts on the corner of Castro and Market street. "He would never clutter up his butt with a giant wallet."
Me: "That's great for him, but I don't care how cluttered my butt is."
The moment I learned that some women (at least one of them), are more interested in form than function when it comes to pants pockets.
What if this is a problem with usability, and have nothing to with personal preferences?
I imagine that for a tight pair of jeans would be pretty annoying put and carry things in pockets. You may even need both hands to put something in your pocket if your pants are tight enough.
This means that even if you had large pockets in tight jeans you would probably not use them anyways.
And looking at the data provided this seems to be a probable exaplanation, as skinny jeans generally have a smaller pocket compared to their straight counterparts.
Unrelated to the general direction the comments are taking here, it's apparently not toooo hard to modify pants to extend their pockets. You'll find tonnes of videos by women on how to do that. So if there are pants that are otherwise good but have small pockets, that is an option.
> There are few things more frustrating than collecting your belongings only to realize that the pockets in your pants are too small to hold them.
I'd like to report sexism.\s
To say that women have few problems more substantial than their stuff not fitting in their pockets is incredibly sexist.\s
As a guy, I'll throw the stuff in my laptop bag (that I carry daily without a laptop) or in a fanny pack if I am going to be more active. This is not a major source of frustration for me, even when I have to carry half-a-dozen medical gadgets with me due to my many conditions. Anyone who finds putting things in their pockets to be a major concern needs to get a real job.
As for the complaint that womens clothing is more for fashion than practicality, they can do what I did when an early Galaxy Note phone did not fit in my shirt pocket: Buy a sewing machine. I still love my Singer 44s.
So you're a man, presumably born as such, and with the stereotypical anatomy thereof. You also acknowledge that you have somewhat idiosyncratic preferences, and the "stuff" you have in mind doesn't fit in pockets anyway. And yet you have the audacity to tell other people what to do, based on your n=1 experience, with the implication that if they just did what you did they'd be happier. That's utter nonsense and defies logic.
- In many instances, a woman who actually prioritizes quantity and quality of pockets has the easy option of purchasing "Men's" clothing.
- Women are generally (by male standards) hyperaware of the "look" of other women, and often are systematically cruel toward a woman whose "look" doesn't meet their approval. If you're a woman, and really want good pockets...you may very reasonably conclude that it would not be worth the social costs imposed by other women.
It stretches credulity, given the control women stereotypically have over clothing decisions, that large-pocketed clothes would not be an option if there was demand. Evidence suggests that any demand is a vocal minority.