Bryn Mawr College

Pennsylvania

1885

official hood lining pattern
yellow
white

Bryn Mawr students adopted yellow and white as their school colors in 1885 when the college was founded. The yellow was of a golden shade, sometimes called “maize”.

A painting from a c.1965 Cotrell & Leonard catalogue of a Master of Science hood worn with a master's gown. In 1960 the sleeve opening on American master's gowns was moved from the elbow to the wrist, as here.
A c.1920 Bryn Mawr College pennant.

Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): yellow/white (1895-1935)

Until his death in 1921, Gardner Cotrell Leonard was the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and a partner in the firm of Cotrell & Leonard, an academic costume manufacturer and the depository for the records of the IBAC. If one assumes that a college or university was assigned a hood lining pattern by the IBAC when academic costume was ordered from Cotrell & Leonard, client lists for Cotrell & Leonard can help one estimate the approximate date that lining pattern was approved by the IBAC.

Bryn Mawr College appeared in Cotrell & Leonard advertisements in three 1897 sources: the Bowdoin Bugle yearbook, The College Year-Book and Athletic Record, and the “Ole Miss” of The University of Mississippi yearbook. Also, a reporter covering commencement ceremonies at the University of Chicago for the Indianapolis News (9 July 1896) mentioned Bryn Mawr as one of a number of colleges and universities that used academic costume. All this suggests an IBAC hood assignment for Bryn Mawr College in 1895 or 1896.

None of these sources described the colors or heraldic pattern of Bryn Mawr’s hood lining, but the college’s hood was cited in the 27 July 1902 edition of The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper, which included a list of IBAC hood lining patterns that had been assigned to some of the more prestigious colleges and universities of the time. Here Bryn Mawr’s hood lining was described as “maize” with a white chevron.

The IBAC tended to use the term “maize” to describe a golden yellow or light orange color. An IBAC list from 1969 described Bryn Mawr’s hood lining as “old gold”, which may have been meant to describe yellow with an orange tint.

Here Bryn Mawr’s traditional shade of golden yellow has been used, as in the original hood lining pattern assigned by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume c.1895-1896.

In a unique stylistic departure from the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume, Bryn Mawr students earning a Bachelor of Arts degree wear hoods trimmed in white fur, not the typical white velvet recommended by the Code.