University of Virginia
Virginia
1819
After the War Between the States, the school colors of the University of Virginia were silver gray (light gray) and cardinal red, symbolizing blood on a Confederate uniform. The faculty did not want the students to dishonor those colors by using them for athletic uniforms, so the students held a meeting in 1888 to select new university colors. A student attending that meeting, Allen Potts, had formerly been on the Oxford Rowing Club in England. It was common for rowers to wear knitted scarfs in their team colors, and at the University of Virginia meeting Potts was wearing a scarf that was dark blue with two orange stripes he had swapped with a member of the Grosvener Rowing Club following a rowing competition at Oxford. At the University of Virginia student meeting, someone snatched this scarf from Potts’s neck and held it up as a way to suggest orange and dark blue as an attractive color combination. The rest of the students agreed, and quickly voted to adopt them as the new colors of the University of Virginia.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): navy blue/orange (1895-1896), blue/orange (1897-1900), orange/blue (1902-1904), orange/dark blue (1906-1911), orange/blue (1912-1935)
According to an advertisement in the November 1905 edition of the University of Virginia Magazine, the university was a client of Cotrell & Leonard, the depository of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC). Although the IBAC’s hood lining assignment for the University of Virginia was not cited in the 1905 advertisement, a 1918 IBAC list described the hood lining as navy blue with an orange chevron. This description was not changed or modified in subsequent Intercollegiate Bureau lists.
The IBAC may have assigned the University of Virginia this hood lining in 1904 or 1905, because during this period the Bureau had revised the hood lining assignment for George Washington University from dark blue with an orange chevron to dark blue with a buff chevron. Thus the University of Virginia may have taken over the former hood lining of George Washington University.
