A Pocket With Lofty Ambitions

What changes in this design

A reader seeing the title may naturally expect a pocket to be explained in terms of holding something, placement, material, or use. Those practical details are usually how people make sense of an everyday object.

Instead, this record stays with what can be seen: a vertical, mostly rectangular outlined form below a long upper edge, slightly tapered wavy sides, horizontal lines, short curved marks, and broken lines near the top.

That distinction helps a reader avoid treating the image as instructions or evidence of how the item performs. The page gives an appearance to examine, not a confirmed material, mechanism, use, or benefit.

Eighty pairs of jeans and a tape measure

In 2018, a small data publication sent people into stores in Nashville, New York and Seattle with a tape measure. They measured the front pockets on 80 pairs of jeans from 20 US brands, men's and women's, every pair at a 32-inch waistband. Women's front pockets came out 48% shorter and 6.5% narrower. Only 40% of them would fully fit one of the three leading smartphones. Most would not admit a hand past the knuckles.

The back pockets were almost even, 5 to 7% shorter. So this isn't, to my eye, a limit of sewing or of bodies. Something specific happened to the front pocket, and it happened a long time ago.

What went missing in the 1790s

Through the 1700s, women's pockets were separate objects. You tied them round the waist and reached them through slits in a full skirt. Then fashion changed with the politics. The slim, high-waisted neoclassical dresses of the late 1700s, cut in light cotton, had nowhere to hide a tied-on bag, and by the early 1800s the fashion plates show women carrying small handbags instead.

One sewn-in pocket came back in the 1840s, tucked into a skirt's side-front seam. Trouser pockets arrived from menswear in the 1940s. Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux set out this timeline in their 2019 history of the pocket, and to my mind it explains the tape measure: the deficit isn't an oversight by today's buyers, it's 230 years of habit.

Fifty-six months for one drawing

On 16 December 2021, a St. Louis company called KDINC, LLC filed design application 29/819,713, with one named inventor, Devin Gilliam. A design patent claims how a thing looks and says nothing about how it works. This one is a single claim across six sheets of drawings, with a 15-year term. The drawings put a pocket on leggings. One figure shows it open with a smartphone inside; the next shows it holding a key fob. It granted on 11 August 2026 as D1,140,507, titled "Pocket".

The pendency is what caught me. In May the patent office reported that first-action pendency on designs had dropped to 14 months, the lowest since 2018, with the unexamined backlog down more than 28% since January 2025. Time to a first action and time to a grant aren't the same measurement, but I still find 56 months a long stay either way. There's a small oddity on the front page too: the only classification code on it is the one for beach capes and robes.

The pockets already for sale

The citation list is, to my eye, the most interesting page. Eleven US patents, the earliest from December 1981. A Chinese design registration from 2020 and a New Zealand one from 1995. And three things a person could simply buy: Patagonia's Pack Out Tights, reviewed in 2017, plus two leggings listings on a large online marketplace, from October 2020 and November 2021. The last of those is four weeks before this application was filed.

An independent review of those tights from 2020 counts three pockets, including a deep, stretchy drop-in pocket low on each side that one tester had carried a phone in for over two years. List price $119. The function was solved and shipping years before the filing, and cheap versions were commodity items by the time it went in. What's left to claim after that is the appearance. That is precisely what a design patent covers, and precisely what fixes nobody's pockets.

The part worth watching

While the application sat, the law moved. In 2024 the Federal Circuit, sitting en banc in an auto-parts dispute, scrapped the old test for design obviousness, dropping the rule that a primary reference had to be basically the same as the claimed design. Combining prior art got easier, and most readings of the decision expect design patents to become easier to invalidate. The court left the boundaries undefined. This one was granted two years later, into a weaker regime than the one it was filed under.

The other thing to watch is what granted apparel designs get used for. One federal district's docket returns 2,669 cases since 2011 filed against sealed lists of unnamed sellers, often without the patent number or a picture of the accused product in the complaint. The scholar who counted them names the recurring error as treating a design patent as owning a concept, an hourglass shape say, rather than the single shape actually drawn.

I don't think this filing is that. The applicant's entire public IP footprint is this patent and a 2021 trademark on a hats logo, and I could not verify any product on sale anywhere. Five years of waiting, for a picture of the thing most of us still can't buy in an ordinary pair of jeans. Watch whether it's ever used, and against whom.

Sources

Reporting for this piece drew on the published filing and the references below.

1. US D1,140,507 S - "Pocket" (USPTO Patent Public Search PDF)
2. Women's Pockets are Inferior (The Pudding)
3. The Hidden History of Pockets in Women's Fashion (PieceWork)
4. CPC Scheme A41D - Outerwear; Protective Garments; Accessories (USPTO)
5. USPTO Reduces Design Patent Examination Pendency by 2.9 Months
6. Patagonia Pack Out - Women's Review (OutdoorGearLab)
7. LKQ Corporation v. GM Global Technology Operations LLC (Fed. Cir. 2024, en banc)
8. Guest Post: We need to talk about the NDIL's Schedule A cases (Patently-O)
9. USPTO issues milestone 1 millionth design patent

The record, briefly. USD1140507S1, “Pocket” The checked public record identifies a U.S. design patent titled 'Pocket'. The reading treats the published title and figure as a visual starting point and does not infer a material, mechanism, or performance claim not established there.

Identity details. The saved title-page transcription needs review, so names are not repeated here. Check the official published title page.

More angles on this

• A Glove With a PortfolioAnother reading from the same A41D classification family, outerwear; protective garments; accessories.
• The Pants Have a Particular Part To PlayAnother reading from the same A41D classification family, outerwear; protective garments; accessories.
• CPC A41D: Outerwear; protective garments; accessoriesThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
• CPC A45F: Travelling or camp equipment: sacks or packs carried on the bodyThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
• The Potato Product Makes Its Entrance in SlicesAnother reading from the neighbouring A45D classification family, hairdressing or shaving equipment ; equipment for cosmetics or cosmetic treatments, e.g. for manicuring or pedicuring.

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