Designers feel your pain. Or, more likely, they’ve watched you struggle desperately to fish a ringing mobile phone from the depths of your shoulder bag, only to miss the call. Or, they’ve seen one too many PDAs slide from the breast pocket of some guy’s shirt to the pavement below. Palm pilots are cool, but not embedded into concrete. Brooks Brothers has put mobile-phone pockets into every outerwear jacket and coat; in the fall, its suit jackets will feature not one but three interior pockets: left-hand chest for the wallet, right-hand chest for the PDA and lower-left waist-level pocket for the phone. Not exactly your father’s Brooks Brothers.
Big pockets on casual clothing–sometimes referred to as “streetwear”–is nothing new; the cargo-pocket trend, for one, seems to come and go as often as that ’70s look. But there’s now a slight shift: pockets that were once merely decorative details are increasingly functional. Kids are using their big pockets to stow pagers and phones safely, thus eliminating the need for a geeky belt clip.
The gadget-oriented functional pocket is trickling up into clothing that’s suitable for the office, where there’s a more obvious need for them. This spring Claiborne introduces its gimmicky-sounding 2.0 line of men’s casual work clothes that has extra pockets everywhere: on the fronts of shirts, the insides of jackets and even stiched into the legs of pants. Samsonite, the Denver-based luggage maker, hired a designer from Prada Sport, the casual clothing of an ultrachic Italian brand, to create its Blacklabel line of clothing. It includes the “voice jacket,” which comes with a Nokia hands-free mobile-phone earpiece that’s sewn directly into the lining of the garment and snakes down to a handy interior pocket for the phone itself.
What will they think of next–wedding dresses with pocket real estate? Vera Wang’s got one with a pocket. Just in case you have to call the groom and remind him to get to the church on time.
