Pondering Pockets: Podcast
In 99% Invisible: Pockets, the central focus is on the differences between male pockets and female pockets and fashion. They target the central focus of pockets: to function as a space holder for tools in every day life. Mobility of these tools for skills is essential With pockets, the items you carry are close, right there on your person, almost becoming a part of you. With bags, the podcast points out, everything is detached and easy to lose or misplace. Bags are easily and often forgotten. This podcast even goes so far as to say that pocket size is just another unnecessary construct. From this, they go in into the history of women's pockets starting in the 1800s. Pockets then used to be so large, they could fit "food for later" in it, whatever that means in the 19th century. After this, the female host visits some experts with garment examples. This presented a problem with the fact that it is a purely auditorial podcast, no video, so the narrator had to explain to the audience in post what some of these things looked like. Pockets prior to the French Revolution were close, almost like lingerie, only seen by a women, her dress-maid, and husband. After the Revolution however, there were no longer spaces in the slim clothing to have those massive pockets like before. During this time, women started using bags due to the lack of pockets, which they called reticules. And yes, it's supposed to sound like ridicule or ridiculous. These handbags, however, were very fashionable at the time and easy to use, expressing individualism and status through the bags as well as the rest of women's clothing. Oddly enough, there were women so passionate about this that they called themselves "anti-pocketist" which were essentially the women who were headstrong about pockets being a symbol of womanly duties around the house. Being freed of this duty and only having a small bag for spending money was liberating. This is still a very popular topic today that is still debated about pockets: should women have the equality of men's large pockets, do we need them, and what does it say about our society and view on women. Further on down the timeline, male tailors started making women's clothing in a male's fashion, adding pockets, but making them smaller and more feminine, essentially making them useless and just a looks thing. The narrator even point out that the average male's suit in 1944 had 24 pockets and 70 buttons. Then Modernism takes ahold of artist, and Bernard Rudolfsky starts to point out the ridiculous ways of fashion, wanting to wash clothing down to a simple, unisex item, striving for a utopia in a way. Fashion would achieve a utopia standard by eliminating status and need for tools -- to be free from the modern look. We can see that tech companies have been trying to do this with inventions of smart watches and glasses. In conclusion, "clothes are needlessly gendered." The podcast concludes with many shoutouts to all that went into the podcast and has a solid 5 mins of commercials all at the end for the lovely listener to just skip or suffer though.
I think it is safe to say that the intended audience is probably a skeptic millennial or younger just based off the fact that this podcast is very fast paced, dealing with feminist and gender issues in a progressive way, and it is a 20 min podcast, which is honestly why I decided to listen to it as well. Though this may be the intended audience, most millennials and gen z kids know a lot about this topic already, and whether you know about the pocketist movement or not, you can always see young females getting excited that a dress has pockets (big pockets for a bonus). It did give younger folks a historical background and founded most of the strong opinions and bias within the podcast itself. In this case, I do believe that the intended audience and the actually audience line up, but it might be more or less effective if they changed their platform for a different dynamic, like making this into a video or article shared by Facebook so that it passes through my mom's feed instead of something recommended to a college student on Spotify.
Like I semi-stated before, this podcast's goal was to show the evolution and reasoning behind the fashion changes of women's pockets in particular, how they compared to men, their efficiency, and their social impact. It accomplished this in a very ear-catching way, which was surprising for a non-fashion-following, half-awake/asleep college student. It brought in people who knew what they were talking about, used historical background, and multiple narrative styles to pull the listener in. At one moment it's an interview, the next it's inside the narrator's head, then it's two people sharing a scripted story together.
This podcast was produced by Avery Trufelman, an industrial designer who now does audio clips about design. She is also the producer of the rest of the podcast that follow in this series, which includes a whole podcast on Hawaiian Shirts. Other than her short biographies on her personal pages and a few small articles written about her, she really is not talked about a whole lot in the podcast realm. However, like i said earlier, they do bring in several specialist, whose names are mentioned in split seconds, and references real historical figures and phenomenon that anyone could find on the web, so she sort of checks out, but I would not rely on her to be an academic source without further research.
As it goes for how much this podcast effected my personal life, it added to the random amount of semi-useless knowledge that everyone collects over the years, but I can see it having no significant impact on any way that I think or treat people. Though this doesn't have a huge impact on me, that wasn't the point. The point of the podcast, rather, was to reassure young people about the debate and history around women's pockets. It wasn't ever trying to win anyone over. If I were to contact the makers of this podcast, I would tell them to stop trying to be so relatable, possibly presenting just facts, but still with the fast paced effect. They did a splendid job keeping the viewer right on track with them, not giving a whole lot of time for listeners to reflect on what they just heard, keeping the podcast so jam packed and short. It would be cool to see if in a few years, more research could be done to see if these pro/anti-pocket movements are actually having an impact on fashion or if they are just yelling into the abyss. As far as rating go, I would definitely consider listening to this series again, maybe even venturing out to the other types of podcast that they do, with other writers and producers as well. Keep 'em coming.
I think it is safe to say that the intended audience is probably a skeptic millennial or younger just based off the fact that this podcast is very fast paced, dealing with feminist and gender issues in a progressive way, and it is a 20 min podcast, which is honestly why I decided to listen to it as well. Though this may be the intended audience, most millennials and gen z kids know a lot about this topic already, and whether you know about the pocketist movement or not, you can always see young females getting excited that a dress has pockets (big pockets for a bonus). It did give younger folks a historical background and founded most of the strong opinions and bias within the podcast itself. In this case, I do believe that the intended audience and the actually audience line up, but it might be more or less effective if they changed their platform for a different dynamic, like making this into a video or article shared by Facebook so that it passes through my mom's feed instead of something recommended to a college student on Spotify.
Like I semi-stated before, this podcast's goal was to show the evolution and reasoning behind the fashion changes of women's pockets in particular, how they compared to men, their efficiency, and their social impact. It accomplished this in a very ear-catching way, which was surprising for a non-fashion-following, half-awake/asleep college student. It brought in people who knew what they were talking about, used historical background, and multiple narrative styles to pull the listener in. At one moment it's an interview, the next it's inside the narrator's head, then it's two people sharing a scripted story together.
This podcast was produced by Avery Trufelman, an industrial designer who now does audio clips about design. She is also the producer of the rest of the podcast that follow in this series, which includes a whole podcast on Hawaiian Shirts. Other than her short biographies on her personal pages and a few small articles written about her, she really is not talked about a whole lot in the podcast realm. However, like i said earlier, they do bring in several specialist, whose names are mentioned in split seconds, and references real historical figures and phenomenon that anyone could find on the web, so she sort of checks out, but I would not rely on her to be an academic source without further research.
As it goes for how much this podcast effected my personal life, it added to the random amount of semi-useless knowledge that everyone collects over the years, but I can see it having no significant impact on any way that I think or treat people. Though this doesn't have a huge impact on me, that wasn't the point. The point of the podcast, rather, was to reassure young people about the debate and history around women's pockets. It wasn't ever trying to win anyone over. If I were to contact the makers of this podcast, I would tell them to stop trying to be so relatable, possibly presenting just facts, but still with the fast paced effect. They did a splendid job keeping the viewer right on track with them, not giving a whole lot of time for listeners to reflect on what they just heard, keeping the podcast so jam packed and short. It would be cool to see if in a few years, more research could be done to see if these pro/anti-pocket movements are actually having an impact on fashion or if they are just yelling into the abyss. As far as rating go, I would definitely consider listening to this series again, maybe even venturing out to the other types of podcast that they do, with other writers and producers as well. Keep 'em coming.
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