Gardner Cotrell Leonard was the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and also a partner at Cotrell & Leonard, one of the major manufacturing firms for academic dress in the United States. Because the relationship between the IBAC and Cotrell & Leonard was tight (contemporary materials described Cotrell & Leonard as the “depository” for the IBAC), it is likely that a school was assigned an academic hood lining pattern by the IBAC when that school made a purchase order for academic costume from Cotrell & Leonard. If this is correct, Cotrell & Leonard advertisements from the turn of the century can provide one with a rough estimation of the date when the hood lining pattern of a particular college or university was first registered by the IBAC.

Fordham University was first referenced (without a description of its hood) in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the Georgetown College Journal, Volume 26, Number 1 (October 1897), which suggests an 1896 or 1897 registry by the IBAC. The first full description of the university’s hood lining can be found in a 1918 IBAC list, where it was described as maroon. That same list cited two additional schools with the same hood lining color – Colgate University and the University of Chicago – which illustrates the difficulty of assigning unique hood linings to two or more schools that use a single color.

As a way of resolving these duplication problems, here Fordham has been reassigned a hood lining that is tailored from maroon velvet instead of silk or satin.