Sometime in the 1770s, a woman in England finished tying her pockets around her waist and then put her skirt on over them. Not a pocket. Pockets, plural, a matched pair of flat bags strung on a single tape and worn like a belt, sitting against the petticoat and reached through vertical slits cut into the skirt above. They were often embroidered by hand. Nobody but her ever saw them.
That is the part I keep turning over. For roughly two hundred years the most useful thing a woman owned was also the most private, and it was not attached to her dress at all.
A pocket was a thing you could lose
There is an English rhyme about this. Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it. To a modern child that line is nonsense, because how do you lose a pocket. To an eighteenth century child it is completely literal. A pocket was a detachable object with a knot in it. You could untie it. You could set it down somewhere. Somebody else could pick it up and walk off with it.
The slit in the skirt was the interface, and it was the only visible evidence that the whole system existed. Everything else lived underneath. A woman could carry a sewing kit, coins, a snuffbox, a letter, keys, and the outer line of her clothing said nothing about any of it.
The silhouette took them away, and nobody voted on it
Around 1800 the neoclassical line arrived. High waist, narrow column, thin fabric falling more or less straight from under the bust. A stuffed pair of pockets tied at the natural waist under that skirt reads as exactly what it is, which is two bags. There was no room left, so the pockets came off and women carried a small drawstring bag in the hand instead. It was called a reticule, and it got nicknamed the ridicule almost immediately, which tells you how the swap was received by the people making it.
Men's tailoring gave up nothing in the same century. The sewn-in pocket stayed, multiplied, and got better. By the end of the 1800s the difference had hardened into an argument rather than an accident. A tailored suffragette suit sold around 1910 on the promise of pockets you could actually use, and newspapers covered it as news, which is its own evidence of how far the ordinary case had drifted.
A pocket costs the line, and we pay it anyway
Here is the part that does not resolve cleanly. A side seam pocket is extra layers of fabric sitting in exactly the place a fitted skirt is trying to be smooth. On a full skirt it vanishes. On a slim one it does not, and if you load it, it shows. Ours are sized for a phone, a key, a lipstick. Past that they will change the shape of the dress and you will see it in the photographs. I would rather write that down than have you find it out at a reception.
The Lottie Dress is the clearest example of the tradeoff being managed. It lists a side seam zipper and pockets, which means the sides of that dress are carrying the closure and the opening between them, in not very much fabric. Corset-style bodice, lace-up corset back, drop waist, vertical seam pleating, sizes XXS to 6X. The vertical pleating is doing real structural work there. Vertical seams are what let a pocket lie flat instead of pushing out.
The Tilly Dress is the plain case, and the plain case is the one a woman in 1775 would recognize on sight. Cream, 100% cotton, cap sleeves, keyhole front, smocking, tea length, pockets, XXS to 6X. A soft cotton skirt at that length swallows a pocket completely. You forget it is in there until your hands need somewhere to be, which was the entire original design goal.
Then there is the Bria Dress, which is the one that surprises people. White A-line gown, sweetheart neckline, adjustable spaghetti straps, boning in the bodice, built-in bra, invisible zipper, sizes 00 to 34. It has pockets. A bride carrying a bouquet has no free hands and no bag, and somebody sat down and thought about that before drawing the side seam.
Lottie and Tilly run XXS to 6X. Bria runs 00 to 34. I check the size run before I agree to write about anything, and the Dresses with Pockets collection is where the rest of them are.
The eighteenth century pockets that survive were embroidered by hand, usually in flowers, on a bag that spent its entire working life underneath a skirt. She finished it anyway. Then she pulled the skirt down over the whole thing and went out the door with her hands free.