Fresh off a Memorial Cup win in June, the Québec Remparts are looking to the past to build their future.
The Quebec Major Junior Hockey League team unveiled new retro-inspired home and away jerseys on Tuesday, September 12, a little less than two weeks before they open their 2023 regular season against the Baie-Comeau Drakkar.
The simplified design of the jerseys harkens back to the 1970s, when the original incarnation of the Remparts won the QMJHL championship five times and the Memorial Cup in 1970-71 with a roster boasting future Hockey Hall of Famer Guy Lafleur.
The red jersey has a broad white stripe at the hem and white stripes around each sleeve. The red collar has white laces at the front. The Remparts’ roundel logo moves to the shoulders, while the black castle tower/lowercase R logo from inside the roundel appears on its own on the front of the jersey with a white outline.
“By using the old logo, we wanted above all to bring back the Remparts dynasty of the 70s and thus recall the history and tradition of the team. Several former star players of the team from that era, including Guy Lafleur, wore the Remparts jersey with pride and it is with this same pride that our players will wear it starting in September.”
— Remparts vice-president of operations Tommy Castonguay (translated to English by Google)
The white jersey is pretty much a straight color swap of the home jersey except for the collar, which remains red with white laces. The logo on the front also has an extra red outline. The collars on both jerseys have a zigzag pattern knit into the fabric.
QMJHL teams wear color jerseys at home and white jerseys on the road for the first half of the regular season, then swap in January to white at home and colors on the road for the second half of the season.
“We are beginning a new turn with the reconstruction of the team and it is our young players, accompanied by veterans, who will continue to keep history alive while building the future of the team. For several years now, we have always given importance to the past, whether in the team locker room with the ‘A history, a tradition…’ roll of honors where all the recipients of the Remparts having won the various QMJHL trophies, as well as all the team alignments since 1969. This is why, in the design of this new sweater, we wanted to bring back this past, full of history and which, without a doubt today, is part of the good years of the Remparts.”
— Remparts deputy general director Nicole Bouchard (translated to English by Google)
Players in the unveiling video the Remparts uploaded to YouTube wore blank jerseys, so we didn’t get a look and what colors or fonts will be used for names and numbers. But a close-up photo of a number on the white jersey posted to Twitter Tuesday afternoon suggests they’ll be black with white and red outlines.
The Remparts last changed their jerseys in 2013-14; that change also included a switch from heritage white to bright white. They wore that previous set when they beat the Seattle Thunderbirds 5-0 in the 2023 Memorial Cup final in Kamloops, British Columbia.