Elinor Carucci and Sara Bader on RBG’s Decision to Buck the Supreme Court’s Sartorial Traditions
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took her seat on the Supreme Court bench on August 10, 1993, she became the second female to serve on the country’s highest court, joining Justice Sandra Day O’Connor(nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981). In the court’s group portrait from RBG’s first term, the nine justices, posed in front of red velvet curtains, wear flowing black judicial robes. The uniform is a simple but powerful symbol: concealing the individual’s body, it conveys impartiality and the somber, collective responsibility to uphold the Constitution. Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor flank the seven male justices.
There isn’t a dress code for Supreme Court justices—the black robe has been worn over the years out of tradition. For the seven male justices in this 1993 court photograph, the white button-down shirt collars and ties (and one cheerful bow tie) are distinguishing fashion choices. RBG and Justice O’Connor, meanwhile, set themselves apart from their male colleagues, each adorning their uniform with a traditional white jabot—a a frill of lace or other type of fabric fastened at the neck and worn over the front of a shirt or robe.
Their colleagues overseas inspired this sartorial accent—barristers in England have long worn jabots, along with gowns and wigs, as part of their customary courtroom attire. French magistrates wear jabots as well, known there as rabats. Lace was considered a marker of wealth and status, not gender, from its origins until the late eighteenth century, and lace neckpieces, such as jabots and rabats, were traditionally worn by men.
It is worth noting that although Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg accessorized their robes with jabots and collars that were seen as feminine in our time, they were appropriating what was once a symbol of masculine power. Purchasing jabots in the United States, though, proved challenging: “Nobody in those days made judicial white collars for women,” Justice O’Connor remembered. “I discovered that the only places you could get them would be in England or France.”
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Dissenting in Style: How Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Collars Became Political Signifiers
