Pockets on Girls' Clothing: A Short History of Why They Vanished — and Why They're Back

The absence of pockets on women's and girls' clothing isn't a mystery — there's a paper trail. Tracing it from 17th-century tie-on pockets through Victorian skirt-engineering through 21st-century streamlined sportswear shows exactly when the pocket vanished and why. Then it shows what made it come back.

Tie-on pockets, 1600–1790

For most of European clothing history, pockets weren't sewn into garments — they were independent objects, fabric pouches tied around the waist with linen tape, accessed through slits in skirts and aprons. The Victoria & Albert Museum's textile archive has hundreds of surviving examples from the 1700s, many embroidered, some massive. Women carried writing supplies, household keys, scissors, snacks, sewing kits. Pockets in this era were not subtle.

The detachable design served a specific economic function: clothes were expensive and resized; pockets were cheap and survived multiple gowns. They were also private — the only personal storage many women had access to.

The slim-silhouette switch, 1790–1850

When the empire-waist neoclassical silhouette became fashionable, the bulky tie-on pocket couldn't fit underneath. Women shifted to the reticule — a small handbag carried by hand or wrist. It was a marketed accessory; it was always smaller than a pocket; it was always visible (so you couldn't carry anything embarrassing).

Costume historians describe this as the moment personal storage on women's bodies stopped being private and started being decorative. It also, unsurprisingly, became smaller — both in volume and in social acceptance. Carrying a lot of stuff started to read as 'unfeminine.'

The Victorian backlash, 1850–1900

The 1881 Rational Dress Society in London listed reform priorities: lighter underwear, no corsetry, and (notably) pockets. Women's-rights activists explicitly tied the pocket question to autonomy. Suffragette Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in 1905 that 'one supremacy there is in men's clothing… its adaptation to pockets.'

Some menswear-influenced women's clothing of this era did carry pockets — riding habits, tailored daywear. But by the time the rationalists pressed for reform, the cultural assumption was already in place: men have pockets; women have purses. Reversing that turned out to be hard.

The streamlined-fashion era, 1960–2010

Modern fast fashion accelerated the loss. Pockets cost money to construct (extra fabric, extra stitching, more failure-prone seams). For a $14 dress shipped from offshore factories, the pocket is a margin-killer. Through the 2000s, dresses on mass retailers averaged 0–2 functional pockets, and 'fake pockets' — decorative welts with no actual cavity — became common.

The kids' clothing version of this is bleaker. A 2018 design audit by Tom & Lorenzo found that 87% of girls' dresses at major US retailers had no pockets at all, while 84% of equivalent boys' shorts and pants had at least two. The discrepancy started at age 2.

Pockets aren't a feature. They're an autonomy infrastructure.

What Princess Awesome did differently

When Rebecca Melsky and Eva St. Clair launched the brand, the pocket question was already a known frustration on parenting forums. Princess Awesome made it a public design rule in 2018 — every dress, every skirt, every pair of pants, every pair of leggings. Not pretend pockets. Phone-sized.

The brand publishes pocket measurements on each product page (depth in inches) and conducts wash-test logs. The pockets sit at the side seam, hand-naturally, with a flat mouth wide enough that a 4-year-old's hand fits without snagging. The construction adds an estimated $1.40 to the cost of goods per garment. The brand wears that cost as marketing.