What’s The History Of Pockets? with Dr. Hannah Carlson

2023-09-06

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You know the feeling when you try on a dress and realize—it has pockets? Those pockets were more than 500 years in the making! Dr. Hannah Carlson joins us this week to discuss why pockets are still not a staple for womenswear, and how people throughout history—from Queen Elizabeth I to suffragettes to a first grader in Arkansas—have taken up pockets as a political cause. Hannah Carlson teaches dress history and material culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. After training as a conservator of costume and textiles at the F...

You know the feeling when you try on a dress and realize—it has pockets? Those pockets were more than 500 years in the making! Dr. Hannah Carlson joins us this week to discuss why pockets are still not a staple for womenswear, and how people throughout history—from Queen Elizabeth I to suffragettes to a first grader in Arkansas—have taken up pockets as a political cause.

Hannah Carlson teaches dress history and material culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. After training as a conservator of costume and textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology, she received a PhD in material culture from Boston University. She has contributed articles to Commonplace: the journal of early American life; Dress: the Journal of the Costume Society of America; and MacGuffin: The Life of Things.

She's also the author of the new book Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close.

Still curious? Check out these resources from the episode:

Abraham Lincoln’s pockets

Jan Diehm and Amber Thomas on women’s pockets

First assassination of a head of state by handgun

Pocket tool kits of the eighteenth century

The Macaroni Boys

Reticules

Women’s Army Corps uniforms

One Year’s Dungaree Debris

Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com.

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