Do you know why the woman in this illustration looks as if someone is poking her with a red-hot iron? Do you see how she can barely bring herself to touch her skirt with her right hand? It's because the pockets on the skirt she is holding out so gingerly are FAKE.
Yep, that's right. FAKE. They're applied with transfers, like so:
Obviously, the woman in the background is sneering at the poor deluded woman in the foreground who thinks fake pockets are better than no pockets at all. If anything, fake pockets are worse …
Thanks to wundermary for the images!
A Dress A Day 
Is it possible that the woman in the background is also a fakery victim? The halter top seems to be imprinted on her short-sleeve top. Either that or her top is so very sheer you can see her bra underneath.
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Perhaps the lady in the background is wishing she got the appliqued pockets instead of the appliqued bra!
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I’m intrigued by the packet description: “Pockets are make believe”. Surely that depends on the perception of the viewer, not the intention of the sham-pocket creator? OK, semantic hair-splitting, but interesting choice of words. The “handpainted effect” – is that achieved via the transfer? Does this make them DOUBLE sham pockets? Oh, the shame of it! I’ll just take a moment to make believe that I’ve made this skirt with sham pockets (I’m thinking bottle green to set off those gold tassels)and move swiftly on – possibly to a “real pockets/sham skirt” project (in an attempt to redress the balance).
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Why go to all that work to put on fake pockets? Real ones would actually be easier! What fools the Fake Pocket Cabal must think we are…
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Fake pockets, sham pockets, pocket ‘effect’and make believe pockets. Trompe l’oeil pockets?I think the look on her face has something to do with having used gloss exterior paint for the ‘effect’ and it hasn’t dried yet. Either that or she’s just realised she’ll have to keep her hankie up her knicker leg 😉
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Erin, and fellow readers, I need help! I’m going on the first annual Bettie Page Theme Cruise (google it, it’s going to be awesome) in October. Any suggestions for wonderful vintage dress patterns to make up? My walk-away dress turned out well (Remember my modifications? Success!), I may make another, but what else?-Sandra
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I am also annoyed by the blouse on the lady in front. It looks very lovely and simple, but you could not construct a collar like that without more seams. I know this is a skirt pattern and that the fake collar was probably invented by the illustrator, but I feel a little cheated anyway.
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anonymous – I would use one of the wonderful pattern links on the side and look for Wiggle dresses – very Bettie Page. FAKE POCKETS! What a travesty!
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The sham pockets are to detract from a “baby bump”. This chick is a starlet and she has decided not to show her “baby bump” in public until People Magazine pays her at least 7 mill! :)Real pockets would be easier, perhaps the designer put faux pockets on to keep anybody from putting a hankie in the pocket an “ruining the line”. 🙂
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Pockets should never, ever be make-believe.
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All fauxpockets are bad; and all slacks and jackets should have real pockets. Recently the fashion columnist for the Wall Street Journal said that she cuts the pockets out of her jeans and sews them shut so it doesn’t “ruin the line”. A good way to ruin a good pair of jeans.I have been reading this site for months and love it and the comments. Finally decided to put in my 2 cents worth.
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But you know, you could use the tacky “color transfer” as a guide to make REAL pockets and put REAL trim on them – thus foiling the evil fake pocket cabal and having lovely big pockets!Toddson
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lol
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As others have said – put the time and effort into real pockets! They wouldn’t be hard and could be exactly the size anyone wanted.I really do not understand the point in the fake pockets—–
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Gail– I have noticed a trend toward truncated pockets in women’s pants and jeans. The pocketing opening is there, and real, but it opens into a little half-inch faux pocket, or in the case of front pockets it will end just below the hip crease– just enough room to put something in and be guaranteed it will fall out.This. Annoys. The. Crap. Out. Of. Me.
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If anything, I would also make real pockets and possibly use the transfer as a guide for trim. I might omit the tassels, or else use real ones. Fake pockets are bad; fake “handpainted” is worse; but fake tassels? That’s the worst for me.I thought that the illustrators made the tops look realistic for skirt patterns. Perhaps this illustrator was so disgusted by the fake pockets that s/he had to draw unrealistic tops to go with them.Sandra/anonymous, have you watched The Notorious Bettie Page? That movie should give you a good idea of the styles that she wore, which did include pencil skirts and wiggle dresses.
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Chantelle- You bet I’ve seen “The Notorius Bettie Page”! I’m a big fan of the styles of the era. I was wondering if anyone had a specific pattern they really liked that they’d like to share with the class. On the cruise, there’s going to be a lecture on fashions of the fifties, as well as burlesque performers and a pin up class!-Sandra
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Bravo to all the above! Yep, I’m with everyone that said to just make the pockets and use the fake ones as a pattern! Such simpletons thinking that they could get away with out putting pockets on! Makes you wonder how many people bought the pattern thinking that it actually had pockets! I’m thinking that a lot of people were pretty ticked off w/Simplicity! And they didn’t have the internet to sound off at them! They had to snail mail their gripes!Oh well… hopefully they learned their lesson.
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Ouch.Chantelle’s right, fake tassels are the top of it.Even though fake pockets are the craziest thing. Where would I put my keys and my handkerchief without pockets, huh?And, Gyr, you’re right too. 😀 The first thing I thought was “I’d love to get a pattern for that TOP.”I think Erin and everyone here warm my heart with their attitude to pockets. 🙂 I’m like without hands without pockets. Exactly like the lady on the picture – “Where should I put my hand?”
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Instead of the gold and the tassels, this poor lady needs “Harold and the Purple Crayon” pockets. Just draw them on as the pattern says, make-believe, and they instantly BECOME REAL POCKETS!
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Perhaps this is a 1950’s “Designed BY Women, FOR Women” thing, where more experienced wives groom teens to be appealingly helpless and dependent upon men? This way, he’ll not only have to unlock the door for you when he drops you off, he’ll have to carry the key! The housewives group also discourages the carrying of a purse, so the date will always have to pick up the tab. Stocking tops are outfitted with a special elastic band to hold a lipstick and a dime for emergency phone calls (to the group.) Interestingly, the daughters of two women from this movement went on to write The Rules.
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Oh no. Those pockets are Make Believe according to the packet. Not fake. That’s an entirely different category. You can put Make Believe stuff into Make Believe pockets. Fake stuff will not fit in Fake pockets.
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ooohh…there’s probably a special Sisterly Ceremony where the Make Believe wedding ring carried throughout courtship in the Make Believe pocket is exchanged for the REAL ring!
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LMAO Anonymous! The only problem is remembering to take your make believe lipstick out of your make believe pockets, otherwise you get make believe stains all over your skirt! Imagine the horror!
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The model looks REALLY dismayed to be trapped in that skirt! I think it was a photo taken at her initiation ceremony into the [Future] Dependents of America group. The lady in the background is one of the group leaders, reading off its mission statement, secret oath, rules, regulations and strategy.
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Cookie – Are you kidding me!? Stocking with lipstick and dime holders? I am intrigued.
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PS I am so glad you have stuck with your real photo cookie.
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THANKS! Strangely…I do seem to remember someone designing a stocking or garter that had a little pocket for essentials. Maybe in the 1920’s?
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Can we bring back the chatelaine, maybe? In addition to full, real pockets, of course. And as class toady, can I offer a shiny red happy birthday apple to Miss Erin? Have a lovely, pocket-filled day!
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I burst out laughing when I saw this — it’s FABULOUS!I think I’d make the skirt with side seam pockets but also use the transfer pattern to add Make Believe Pockets. It would be the most confusing skirt ever.
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Let me add my best birthday wishes!-Sandra
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Real pockets or fake pockets, either way, make one’s hips ‘Hippo-size.’Bulge on bulk is never slimming.
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A cupboard in my kitchen that is under my stovetop has a handle on it – but it doesn’t open. It’s a fake drawer. I hate that. Plus, my kids keep trying to open it, and someday that handle is going to get ripped off.My husband hates fake things so much that he wouldn’t buy a dresser that had four drawers but was made to look like it had five.
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LOL, they were very lazy sewers back in the day, though it dose look like it could be a nice skirt!
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I do believe some of the steampunk kids are making and selling garters that hold assorted goodies, including lipstick-sized things – likely available on etsy, although who knows what you’d search for. 🙂
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Bwa, it is a bizarre deal, make believe pockets that are supposed to look like you painted them; so wrong on so many levels. The transfers are actually French’s Mustard yellow, not exactly a color to go with everything. The pattern itself is a classic half circle skirt and a cumberbund, very straight forward.I just pulled a 40’s collection of “thermographs” out of a previously unseen stash of my Mom’s. It has some wild V for Victory stuff and a transfer of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s head, wonder how that would look on a skirt…
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Yes! Fake drawers are SO annoying! I’m intrigued and repelled also by fake windows – here in the UK you often see odd gaps where windows should be, sometimes painted black with white cross-frames. This curious practice dates back to a hefty window tax introduced under the wonderfully named Act of Making Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money, 1696 – according to Wikipedia – which served to incentivise this peculiar fenestral fakery. It was also alleged to be the origin of the phrase “daylight robbery”, but Erin could probably put us straight on that one.This was in lieu of income tax, by the way, which was way too controversial and unpopular to introduce at the time. But you can see how it would tend to tax the wealthy.So, which of the presidential hopefuls over there would have the gall to suggest a real-pocket tax, I wonder? – on the grounds that those with lots to put in their big pockets can afford to loose a little. My, how we’d all suffer here on DaD!
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If a fake bolero is a fauxlero is a a fake pocket a fauxect? Happy Birthday Erin
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I was thinking more of the lady with the fake halter top as wearing a fauxlter top! OH the Fauxness you’ve started, Erin!HAPPY BIRTHDAY a lil’ bit late! 29 again is a FABULOUS birthday to have.. trust me, I’ve had over 10 of ’em! 😀
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I just spit my Diet Dr. Pepper all over the monitor–who’d’ve thought a post on pockets would make my day?Thanks, Erin. And you’re SO on target about both the necessity of pockets in a shirtdress AND what the ladies on the front of this pattern are saying/thinking. 🙂
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Here is a prime example of a fakery we live with every day, in all communities: SHUTTERS BOLTED TO BUILDINGS THAT WOULDN’T EVEN COVER THE WINDOWS IF CLOSED! This started to drive me crazy once I noticed it. You’ll see a long picture window on a Colonial Revival house, flanked by one slender shutter at each end, perhaps even sporting cunning cutouts. You’re fooled into thinking, “How quaint…how pretty. What lovely contrasting shutters in Williamsburg Blue.” Then the shock sets in, for one does not have to be an MIT graduate to grasp that those dinky little shutters would NEVER span the window’s length. You trespass and grasp at the shutters, vainly trying to prove your theory by closing them…but the nightmare continues as you realize they’re fixed in place, and what you have in your trembling and soon-to-be handcuffed hands are shutters that will never actually SHUT! How can we expect our nations children to grow up honest when THIS is what we give them??
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Cookie, this is my second reply on fake shutters (the other is in tomorrow’s post, time travel being one of my many wonderful qualities I’ve attained since passing 40) and I realised I was so wrong to state that Britain has no shutters. It does. But they tend to be of a certain age and internal, located in shutter boxes to the sides of sash windows. The house I live in has them in every room (how embarrassing of me to overlook that!) BUT, alas, most of our shutter boxes are empty, the folded shutters that should hang inside having been dismantled by a previous occupier, possibly as firewood some extended cold winter long ago, I imagine. It’s a real pity because they work beautifully to keep the warmth in during the winter as well as the heat/glare out in the summer. So, this isn’t precisely fake shutter territory, but maybe we could file it under “shutter disappointment”.Looks like I need a holiday (preferably in a Tuscan farmhouse with adequate shutterage).
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I know the type you mean! We have them in some finer Victorian homes over here…and yes, sometimes the shutter boxes are empty. BUT sometimes they have been painted or paneled over and ignored for decades, and a lucky dweller suddenly discovers they have hidden shutters throughout their whole house! Our exterior shutters I think were originally there not so much for privacy or warmth, but to protect windows from being lashed by heavy east coast winds, which in some locations can actually tear shingles off houses! It is THOSE exterior shutters, which once did such an upstanding job, that have been reduced to a mere mockery of their former selves. Thanks for your post!
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