Most jeans have it – but who ever uses it?
We’re talking about the teensy-tiny fifth pocket above a normal-sized pocket on the front of your jeans.
Editors at the Yahoo Canada office have used it for everything from lipstick to subway tokens to “tiny snacks,” but we’ve often wondered what it’s really for.
Wonder no more! It’s a watch pocket.
According to Perth Now, the always-pressing question was revisited in a Quora thread, where people have been discussing the mystical fifth pocket for years.
“The first blue jeans had four pockets—only one in back and, in the front, two plus the small watch pocket,” explains a Levi’s blog post. Originally included as protection for pocket watches, thus the name, this extra pouch has served many functions, evident in its many titles: frontier pocket, condom pocket, coin pocket, match pocket and ticket pocket, to name a few.”
The pocket dates back to the oldest pair of jeans in the Levi’s archive, Levi’s historian Tracey Panek tells Huffington Post. And those jeans are from 1879!
