Romaine LeGallou heard the Supreme Court of Canada was turning 150 and needed a wardrobe update. And after that, everything seemed to happen so quickly.
She expressed interest. She got a call to make a pitch. Her company was chosen.
Then the real work began.
“It was such pressure for the team. It happened four weeks before I gave birth for the first time!” LeGallou said, laughing.
LeGallou is the CEO of Les Rabat-Joies, a small shop in Saguenay, Que., that makes bespoke court attire for lawyers and judges.
When it comes to designing attire for Canada’s highest court, there is a protocol you have to follow.
But the company was determined to spruce things up.
LeGallou and her staff put in countless hours to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
And all of that work seems to have brought this small but mighty team even closer together.
Doing the court justice
There are strict rules in Canada on how lawyers and judges must dress, depending on the court. Robes are always black, tabs always white.
Les Rabat-Joies finds ways to personalize legal garb that respects tradition.
Clients can choose from dozens of models for tabs, with everything from lace or crocheted collars, to rainbow-stitched tabs and pearls. Standard robes can be lined with prints featuring anything, from St. Bernards to playing cards, Vespa scooters, feathers or zebra stripes.
In other words, a made-to-order robe is business on the outside, but party on the inside.
In French, the word “rabat-joie” means kill-joy. But “rabat” in French also refers to what are known in English as tabs or bands: those two white strips of fabric lawyers and judges wear at their collars in court.
Stéphanie Gobeil, the assistant director of Les Rabat-Joies, says the company’s name plays on that notion, bringing something unexpected, maybe even fun, to the courthouse.
“We want our clients to know that if they come to us, they’re going to have a court wardrobe that rocks, that’s different from what they’ll find anywhere else,” Gobeil said.
For a long time, jurists in Canada have bought their legal attire from large companies that dressed both lawyers and judges and the clergy.
‘Perfection, nothing less’
During the spring and summer, the Rabat-Joies team devoted itself to creating signature attire for each of the nine justices.
Myriam Herrera is Les Rabat-Joies’ technical lead.
She started working as a dressmaker in her native Nicaragua when she was 14 and worked for years in fashion design. She joined the company in 2024, six years after arriving in Saguenay.
And at the shop, there are two employees whom the business recruited from Nicaragua and Colombia on temporary work permits.
Herrera says the team’s goal is the same for all their custom-made orders.
“We all bring our input to what we design here and make adjustments so everyone leaves with the product they wanted,’’ Herrera said.
LeGallou and Herrera travelled to Ottawa last year to meet with the justices, take their measurements and talk about their own visions for their new robes.
They sourced black silk from Korea. The Cormier emblem, symbol of the Supreme Court of Canada, was embroidered 2,500 times into the fabric. Buttons with the emblem were designed and produced in the region.
Each robe required 40 hours of work.
“Perfection, nothing less,” is how LeGallou describes her team’s commitment to this historic change for the court.
Canada’s 10th — and tiniest — Supreme Court judge
Last September, Herrera and LeGallou returned to Ottawa to deliver the finished robes.
They were a hit.
The ceremonial robes were unveiled publicly at the opening of the Supreme Court season on Oct. 6, in Ottawa.
In prepared remarks, Chief Justice Richard Wagner said the new robes preserved the dignity and the authority of the judicial role.
“They have a modern and simple design that echoes our commitment to openness and accessibility in a way that is distinctly Canadian,” he said.
LeGallou says the move by the Supreme Court to modernize serves as a tacit approval for courts elsewhere in Canada and the people who work there to change things up a bit.
Around the time the designs were unveiled, Herrera was celebrating her birthday.
LeGallou opened a bottle of champagne and they toasted how far Herrera had come since arriving in Canada.
“It was a day full of emotion,” LeGallou said. “And she is so proud, not just of this realization, but she’s married, she has her three children here. I’m so happy to be part of this great story.”
Herrera had a surprise in store for LeGallou when the two were preparing to deliver the robes to Ottawa. There was a tiny replica of the justices’ attire, tailor-made for LeGallou’s nine month-old son Abraham.
“It was a gift to mark this historic project,” LeGallou said. “I can’t express how touched I was by this gesture.”
The fight to keep the team together
Les Rabat-Joies’ work on the Supreme Court‘s wardrobe has drawn attention and business appears to have picked up.
The challenge, moving forward, is to make sure the team stays together.
Herrera is fully settled in Quebec. But the same can’t be said for the two staff members on temporary work permits.
CEO LeGallou says she wants them to get the chance to do what Herrera did: set down roots in Saguenay and stay.
But changes to federal and provincial immigration rules have put those workers in a precarious position. Dressmaking is no longer considered a “rare” occupation under Ottawa’s job classifications, which once gave foreign workers a more direct path to permanent residency.
And Quebec’s raising of the bar for French-language proficiency has made it harder for workers to stay.
LeGallou has been in discussions with authorities through her lawyers for months, fighting for a solution that would allow her employees to remain in Canada. She says she’s worried about her business, but she is even more worried about the people to whom she made a promise.
“When I hired them, I was sure I could keep them,” LeGallou said. “Not just for two years.”
The legal battle to keep her team intact is all the more important since the unveiling of the Supreme Court robes, according to the CEO.
“Every week I see more and more orders from new cities, new provinces,” LeGallou said. “The vision is to keep working from Saguenay but to ship our creations across Canada.”