Have you ever found yourself wondering what the tiny pocket-within-a-pocket is for on your jeans? You know the one Iโm talking about; that small, seemingly useless space that doesnโt appear large enough to hold anything.
If youโve ever tried to see what fits in there, youโll know itโs far too small for a cellphone, while itโs awkward to jam cash โ be it coins or notes โ in there. The same goes for a ring of keys; there just isnโt room.
So what are those little pockets for? Well, fortunately for our curious readers, we haveย something of an answerโฆ and it might not be at all what you were expecting.
Be they male or female models, chances are if you look at a pair of jeans, youโll find two pockets on the front and two pockets on the back. What you might also find, however, is a strange little pocketย insideย one of the front pockets.
Go ahead and have a look. Almost all jeans have them, though their presence is enough to leave most of us scratching our heads.
As mentioned above, these pockets are far too small to hold anything of real significance (even getting two fingers into them is a challenge). So what purpose do they actually serve?
Interestingly, to find the originย we have to goย back almost two hundred years. That little thumbnail-sized pocket isnโt a modern addition to jeans; instead, it was a practical solution for something thatโs no longer a real problem today.
Behind the invention is none other than legendary jean manufacturer Leviโs.
According to UK newspaper The Independent, the first โextraโ pocket came into use in the 1800s. The reason? To assist the most common wearers of jeans at that point in timeโฆ cowboys.
Cowboys usually carried their pocket watches on chains or inside their waistcoats, but both of these methods put the watch at great risk of being broken during their ownerโs day-to-day duties.
In order to combat this, Leviโs introduced a small pocket designed to carry a watch safely. By keeping their watches in these tiny pockets, cowboys could ride without fear of them being smashed on a ride.
Howโs that for innovation?
If Iโm honest, I had no idea. If you ask me, itโs incredible that the design has stuck with jeans all the way through to modern day. Cowboys might no longer be around, but their watch pockets certainly are!
