Special hell

[ladyofastolat]

You know Shepherd Book's thing about the special hell reserved for people who talk in the theatre? Forget talking in the theatre! The special hell needs to be reserved for designers who think that fake pockets are a good idea.

Yes, I know I've ranted about this before, but fake pockets? FAKE POCKETS? WHY? I have been told that garments hang better and travel better if pockets are sewn up, so I can perhaps, and very grudgingly, accept that there might be a slight justification for sewing up pockets in garments destined for a life of stardom as a catwalk or catalogue model. But I'm talking about cheap, functional garments that will never look glamorous. I'm talking about garments that don't have pockets at all, merely useless little flaps - not even decorative ones, but boring, barely visible ones - that look as if they belong to pockets, but don't. WHY? WHY? If there was no pocket at all, perhaps I could learn to live with it; I do, after all, possess pocketless skirts and dresses. But why go to the effort of adding a useless little fake pocket opening unless you're doing it purely to deceive and enrage? Your eyes think there's a pocket there. Experience from other trousers tells you there'll be a pocket there. The useless little flap of fabric draws your fingers into it, only to make them come up short.

I have been told that men's trousers are immune from this plague. However, strangely, I have never yet heard a woman say, "Oh, I am SO overwhelmed today. I've got 4 pockets on my trousers, and it's such a lot to think about. If only two of them were fake!"

Give us trousers without pockets for those who want them. Give us trousers with pockets for those who want them. But don't give us trousers that say, "Hey, look at me! I've got 4 lovely pockets!" only to reveal once you've got them home that two of them are WICKED LIES!

And, yes, I KNOW that the moral of this story is "don't hastily buy trousers without checking the pocket situation," and "don't assume that, just because a pair of trousers appears to be UTTERLY IDENTICAL to the pair you bought from the same shop last year, it really IS utterly identical, and hasn't replaced perfectly functional pockets with fakes."

AND while I'm busy ranting about trousers... I'm five foot five and a bit, which is round about the average height for women in the UK. Something is very wrong in the world of women's trousers if trousers marked as "short" are 2 inches too long for me. Last year's pocket-rich well-nigh-identical-but-not pair were also "short" and exactly right. I suspect them of taking the fabric they saved from the pockets and sticking it on the hems.

Comments

[songblaze.livejournal.com]

...I'm terribly jealous that cheap cot/lin trousers are a commonly available thing over there! They're annoyingly hard to find on this side of the pond, unless one wants to pay a good bit more than I care to most of the time.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

They seem to appear in our shops every year round about March or April, ready for summer holidays. (Anyone trying to buy them in November is doomed to failure.) My problem is that I wear them a LOT, including on long walks, so the fabric between the legs tends to wear through. The very cheap ones I bought last spring - a supermarket's own brand - have actually lasted a LOT better than the slightly more expensive ones I bought from elsewhere, which wore into holes within months.