incidentally

[metaphortunate]

Posted without comment:

By the time Diana Vreeland joined Harper's Bazaar in 1937 as a junior editor, handbags had become an integral and important part of the fashion business, as she would quickly learn. Shortly after she arrived at the august glossy, Vreeland had what she described in her memoir, D.V., as a "brainwave!"

"We're going to eliminate all handbags," she told a colleague.

"You're going to what?" he responded.

"Eliminate all handbags," she repeated. "Now look. What have I got here? I've got cigarettes, I've got my lipstick, I've got my comb, I've got my powder, I've got my rouge, I've got my money. But what do I want with a bloody old handbag that one leaves in taxis and so on? It should all go into pockets. Real pockets, like a man has, for goodness sake."

Then Vreeland explained how she wanted to devote an entire issue of the venerable fashion magazine to "showing what you can do with pockets and how the silhouette is improved and so on."

Her colleague ran from her office - "the way you run for the police!" she recalled - straight to Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow.

"Diana's going crazy!" he cried. "Get hold of her."

Snow went to see Vreeland.

"Listen, Diana," Snow told Vreeland, "I think you've lost your mind. Do you realize that our income from handbag advertising is God knows how many millions a year?!"

- Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster, by Dana Thomas

"Thanks. It has pockets!" - every girl ever responding to a compliment on a skirt/dress that has pockets

- Tumblr/Twitter, attribution unknown

Comments

[ambyr]

I have in my possession a pair of cargo pants from a rather well-known women's clothing brand. They're made from nice, thick canvas--the sort you can wear without fear while tromping through thorn bushes. They have lovely large cargo pockets on the mid thighs, big enough to hold a water bottle or a heavy flashlight or a small book.

. . . .and after adding those, the designers apparently suddenly remembered they were making clothes for women and removed all other pockets from the design. No hip pockets. No side pockets. Why would women need those?

Cargo pants. Missing the point.

But I bought them anyway, because they were $5 at the thrift store, and damnit, I needed thick pants.

[metaphortunate]

WHY AAARGH WHY