jane jacobs

When Jane Jacobs’ sons were in danger of being drafted into Vietnam, the Jacobs family emigrated to Canada and eventually became Canadian citizens. An interviewer at Metropolis later asked if this was disruptive. Jacobs answered:

Well, it would have been disruptive if we had thought of ourselves as exiles. People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really. We thought of ourselves as immigrants. And it was an adventure and we were all together.

“We wanted to be a part of where we were,” she said. “Being an exile is having it fixed in your mind that you’ve just come to a place as a stop-gap measure.”

Exile worked for me until I had children. I could be in the city, but also apart from it. I could detach whenever I wanted to. I could hide out. Make my own world.

Even with babies, exile still worked. I was home with them. No need to send them anywhere. I could swaddle them up and keep them close. Pull the shades down and stay in.

Now they are growing up, and they want — they demand — to be a part of the world around them. They want to go outside and turn over every rock. They want to meet and befriend everyone on the sidewalk.

I never resent my kids, but, in my darker moments, I resent the way they have made me vulnerable to my surroundings. Suddenly, I am at the mercy of my street, my neighborhood, my city, my state, my country.

My children are natives, but I am still in exile.

It’s time to immigrate… or return home.

In Steal Like An Artist, I pointed out that David Hockney had a special pocket sewn into his suit coats for sketchbook, and the musician Arthur Russell had pockets sewn onto his shirts so he could carry around a pen and a pocket notebook for musical ideas. (You can see his penchant on display in the photos above.)

I thought about Russell yesterday, when I saw designer Kelli Anderson (author of This Book Is A Planetarium) tweet that women’s clothes with no pockets are “a vestigal decision to disempower.” Women’s clothes without pockets, she says, imply that the wearer:

• isn’t expected to build anything
• is invited to contribute her appearance, first and foremost
• should be controlled/surveilled

Like the oblivious man that I am, I’d never given the issue a thought.

My feminist superhero uniform is a dress with pockets

— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) December 22, 2017

In the “Politics of Pockets,” writer Chelsea G. Summers explores the history of pockets, linking to a bunch of cool sources, and summing it up:

Men’s dress is designed for utility; women’s dress is designed for beauty. It’s not a giant leap to see how pockets, or the lack thereof, reinforce sexist ideas of gender. Men are busy doing things; women are busy being looked at. Who needs pockets?

In “Jane Jacobs, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Power of the Marimekko Dress,” critic Alexandra Lange (I can’t wait to read her book, The Design of Childhood) writes about how she noticed that Jane Jacobs and Georgia O’Keefe wore the same dress… with pockets, of course:

Maybe this is a footnote, but it is a fascinating one. In 1963, the same year that O’Keeffe probably bought her dress, Eugenia Sheppard, the fashion critic for the New York Herald Tribune, called such dresses “a uniform for intellectuals . . . Marimekko is for women whose way of wearing clothes is to forget what they have on.” Who could be more desirous of forgetting what they had on than women such as Jacobs and O’Keeffe, who had so much to do? And who would better understand their needs—skirts for riding, pockets for paper and pen—than powerhouses such as Annika Rimala, who designed their dress…

When I was poking around the Twitter responses, I came across this dad, who said he sews giant pockets into his daughter’s school uniforms.

(I will restrain myself from complaining about the contemporary scorn of cargo shorts…)