“The effect is certainly far from ludicrous”
By Tatstiana Coquerel
These newly designed barrister tabs were created by Jodie McArdle, and hand made in Ireland from polyester and guipure lace. McArdle is a contemporary designer who studied fashion design in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She focused on this aspect of legal dress as she wanted to improve wearability. She said ‘I tried out different construction methods, alternative forms of closures and played around with the shape and length of the bibs and tabs and experimented with various fabrics, trimmings, laces, and finishing to achieve perfect designs and proportions’.
The tabs are designed to be worn alongside the black gown of barristers, the legal professionals who mainly act as advocates in court cases. In the streets around the Four Courts in Inns Quay, Dublin 7 barristers dressed in gowns and tabs (and sometimes wigs) are highly visible, and this was the starting point and inspiration for this study. The Four Courts houses the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the High Court and the Dublin Circuit Court. It was designed by Thomas Cooley and James Gandon and built 1776-1802. In 1922, destroyed during the Irish Civil War and then reconstructed to designs of T.J. Byrne between 1924 and 1931.
Legal and judicial dress such as these tabs is a special type of the dress worn by judges and members of the legal community to differentiate membership of the legal professional group from other members of the public. It has its roots in royal and apostolic history. Continued use of this distinctive form of dress in Ireland is not due to some ignorant strict devotion to old traditions and practise, but rather because of its effectiveness in promoting solemnity, consistency and continuity in the Irish legal system.
The costume of lawyers and judges was established by the time of Edward III (1327-77) and developed throughout Europe in the centuries following. In the 17th Century, various countries systemised their legal order, court system, customs and traditions in relation to the legal and judicial dress. In 1635 a royal decree was passed– known as the Judges Rules of 1635 – which aimed to regulate court dress. Judges were obliged to wear a taffeta-lined black or violet silk robe with cuffs lined with silk or fur, a hood and a mantle, with coifs or caps on top. Legal dress could not avoid the trends of fashion and wigs, worn by representatives of legal profession, are the perfect example of it. In the later 17th Century, wigs became a fashionable accessory in the dress of wealthy and well-established social classes of the society. They were made from human or horsehair with curls over the shoulders. Although wigs became less fashionable, they continued to be an important element of judicial attire over the next centuries with the requirement to wear wigs only ending in Ireland in the last decade.
The first female magistrate sat in Dublin in February 1920 and by January the following year the first woman juror sat on a case in Dublin. 1921 was also the year of the first call of women to the Bar in Ireland. In November 1921, the first Irish women were called to the Irish Bar in the new Irish Free State. The call of the first two female barristers, Frances Kyle and Averill Deverell, made headlines in Ireland and all over the world. On her first day arriving to the Law Library, Averill Deverell was criticised by male colleges that her appearance was ridiculous. The editor of the Irish Law Times stated in her defence: ‘The question has not created any difficulty in Ireland where lady barristers wear the same style of wig and bands as men. The effect is certainly far from ludicrous. It is regarded as very becoming to the lady wearer.’ (The Law Library, 2020). The Irish legal landscape changed dramatically over the following decades and there was an increasing presence of women in the legal profession from the 1970s, with the introduction of new laws that liberated women in Ireland in different aspects of their life and career.
Barristers, who are experts in law and act as advocates in trials, now only wear wigs occasionally. What sets them apart in most courts is their usual dress of dark clothes, a black gown and white collar or bib. These tabs by Jodie McArdle are innovative in signifying choice and a ‘feminising’ of barrister dress.
Image Credits
All images courtesy of Jodie McArdle