Just stop for a moment and check your pockets. If you are wearing jeans you probably have at least five. A shirt carries a breast pocket. Fitted trousers have side pockets. A cardigan may well have two patches, three, or four if it’s alluding to Chanel.

Even a dress is likely to sport sneaky pockets tucked into the seams, great slabs slapped on the front or dainty decorative ones just about big enough for a doll’s hand. If you managed to leave the house today unaccompanied by pockets, you are a rarity. Perhaps you broke out in a catsuit. Once, no outfit was complete without a handbag. Now none is complete

without a pocket.

This has been a quiet revolution. Ever since Mulberry launched the infamous Roxanne in October 2003, handbags have been growing in price and size, their increasingly ferocious hardware glinting in our hands like giant knuckle dusters. Then in March last year the tide turned.

The consumer research specialist Mintel forecast an 18% fall in sales growth in the luxury sector. Brief, sheepish asides about the end of the “It” bag have peppered Vogue, although the sensitivities of its advertisers have deterred it from nailing the demise.

At the autumn/winter catwalks few or no handbags appeared on such diverse runways as Givenchy, Versace and Balenciaga. Instead, models sauntered along with hands dug deep into the folds of their clothes. The pockets had become the protagonist.

Harriet Quick, the fashion feature director of Vogue, believes pockets make the wearer feel more relaxed - “not casual, but easier”. A pocket, she says, gives you insouciance. It fits with the current dress-down mood, and when you’re standing at a party with one hand holding a drink and the other feeling awkward, it can find its place in a pocket, fiddle with a lipstick, flip a coin.

And, of course, as the credit crisis worsens and shoppers retreat from the idea of spending a small fortune on a handbag, it fits that the most appropriate refuge for overspending hands might be the stillness and sanctuary of a pocket. If our economic self-consciousness continues, the chances are those pockets will have little inside them but at least we will all look insouciant.