Pockets equal liberation for women in a new age of comfort
While I was queuing for a coffee, at a café in east London, I eavesdropped on two hip young women standing in front of me. “I LOVE your trainers,” said one, pointing covetously at the other’s box-fresh Reeboks. “Oh thanks,” said the other, with a little blush of pride. “I just want to be happy and comfortable, you know?”
If that sounds to you like a modest ambition, my guess is you’re a man. Being happy and comfortable in our shoes – or clothes – is not something women take for granted. In fact, it is so novel that it amounts to a quiet revolution.
Right now, women’s fashion is enjoyable to wear. That has never happened before in my lifetime – perhaps in the history of fashion. Feminists have long implored women to don more comfortable clothes, but without much success. “If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got?” despaired Germaine Greer almost three decades ago. “If she never takes off her highheeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?”
Now, at last, we may find out. The rise of “athleisure” – meaning sporty-looking kit that can be worn outside the gym – has made Greer’s dream a reality. Sales of high heels dropped by 12 per cent in America last year, according to the latest retail figures, while trainer sales rose by 37 per cent. Nor does the revolution stop at our feet. Leggings (slobby) have been transformed into “yoga pants” (aspirational). Dressing entirely in elasticated clothes is no longer an admission of defeat, but a fashion statement.
For those professions that retain a formal dress code, help is on its way. Joanna Dai, a former investment banker in the City, started her own fashion line after having a meltdown on an aeroplane. “My waistband was digging in so much I wanted to explode,” she explained. “There was no flexibility in my clothes, they were constrictive round the arms and the waist. I wondered if there could be workwear that looked like a power suit, but felt like yoga clothes.” Her Dai clothing line is a huge success. It looks smart, but everything is stretchy, everything goes in the washing machine, everything has pockets.
Pockets, by the way, are a feminist issue. Men have had pockets since the 17th century – enabling them to keep their keys and money to hand, without the inconvenience of holding them in a bag. Women, though; well, it’s not as though the silly dears need to use their hands for anything else, is it?
Campaigning women have been asking for pockets since the “rational dress” movement of the Victorian era. But they have only now become a regular feature of high street fashion: a change brought about, I suspect, less by progressive ideology than by the need to accommodate mobile phones. Never mind. Finally having pockets – proper deep ones, into which you can plunge your hands insouciantly – is such a gift that it hardly matters how it came to us.
While fourth-wave feminists bicker about what constitutes a woman, the fashion industry, including female entrepreneurs like Dai, is changing the way we experience the world. Wearing comfortable, practical clothes that don’t pinch or rub, that won’t damage your spine or deform your feet: this is women’s liberation in its most belated, most personal, form.