When it comes to the clothes that we wear, some of their details are so small-yet-ubiquitous that we may overlook or take them for granted. And one of those tiny-yet-commonplace details is that tiny little pocket on your blue jeans. To most people, they’ve always been there so you probably don’t question their existence. But why do most jeans have that tiny little pocket? What’s its purpose?
Well, that small, shallow, and frequently unused pocket usually located above & within the main righthand pocket of your jeans most often gets called a coin pocket. But it wasn’t actually designed for loose change: it was originally meant to house the great-grandfather of the smartwatch.
It was actually Levi Strauss, himself (the man who literally invented jeans way back in 1873), who invented that tiny extra pocket. And according to a blog post on the Levi’s website, early on, back when Strauss’s jeans were primarily being designed for cowboys, that small pocket began being placed on jeans as “protection for pocket watches”.
And while the tiny pocket has been around for almost as long as denim jeans, themselves, the name for that tiny pocket has shifted over the past century-and-a-half to better reflect what it’s used for. It’s been called a frontier pocket, a coin pocket, a match pocket, a ticket pocket, and lots more.
So, however you refer to your tiny jeans pocket, and whatever you use it for, now you know why it’s there. And if you’ve got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved, don’t keep it tucked away…send it to me in an email: [email protected].
BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Berryville Graphics