I felt disappointed by this report. It ignores the modern aspect of pockets that I found out after googling for a half hour.

Men still have useless pockets. The “coin pocket” in jeans is actually for a pocketwatch. So why do we still have it? It’s not because fashion simply couldn’t do without it – it’s because we found another utility for it, namely, holding coins. If it had no utility, it would have been faded out, since mostly only jeans had the pocket. Now even regular trousers have a small inner cloth pocket that serves much the same modern function. And this is adaptation to market forces is what causes women’s clothes to not have pockets.

Women’s pockets are nonexistent because women’s fashion is intense. Go into any clothing store (I notice it especially in thrift stores) and you will notice there is between 2 and 10 times more clothing for women than men. This isn’t because women need more clothes, like they’re constantly falling apart, or because they’re losing their clothes all over the place. It’s because the women’s clothing fashion industry responds to a demand for constantly new and different articles of clothing. Our culture reinforces the idea that women must always be fashionable and attractive, and if a woman isn’t buying the newest fashions, she isn’t fashionable. That’s been true for a long time, but industrialization has lowered the cost of new fashions significantly, and consumers no longer focus as much on quality. The result is a lot more affordable, fashionable clothes.

If you talk to women’s clothing designers today, they _want_ to put pockets in their clothes, but they are often forced to remove them. Why? One reason is cost. Because designers have to churn out new articles all the time, they fight a very narrow window between the cost to produce clothes, and the consumer’s available money to buy new clothes. Often, the only way to churn out a new clothing line every season is to reduce the cost of production – namely, spending less on material and speeding up production. Cut out the pockets and you save on materials and production costs, and thus save money.

Another common reason is that it is indeed hard to relocate a pocket on a garment and not make it look ridiculous. Imagine a big fat pocket on your calf, or the front of your thigh, or the back. Or even on a dress, putting the pocket at or above the hip. Now put something inside it. Now I have either thick hips, or these weird lumps all over my body. This is not the aesthetic most women are looking for. Not only is it awkward to relocate pockets, it makes the clothing look weird. So you can try to use the same old front-thigh-hidden pocket, but if it makes the clothing hang weird on the body, or lumps in it break up the silhouette, it’s no longer fashionable or attractive, which kills its marketability. An actual women’s clothing designer reports here that women complain about similar issues when pockets are added: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-womens-clothes-seem-to-lack-pockets-Is-this-really-an-effort-to-make-women-buy-handbags

To reintroduce pockets, women’s fashion needs to do three things: 1) embrace less tight-fitting clothes, 2) re-introduce pockets through consumer demand, and 3) produce less clothing lines less frequently. It seems like the third thing is actually what’s holding back pocket introduction more than 1 and 2.