The Cotrell & Leonard academic costume firm was the depository for the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), and the names of both are mentioned in the same advertisements from the late 1890s and early 1900s. Gardner Cotrell Leonard, one of the partners of Cotrell & Leonard, was also the Director of the IBAC, so it is likely that when a school ordered academic caps, gowns, and hoods from Cotrell & Leonard, the hood lining colors and heraldic pattern used for the order would be registered with the Bureau. Hood registration dates for schools, therefore, can be estimated as roughly contemporaneous with the first appearance of that school in a Cotrell & Leonard/Intercollegiate Bureau advertisement.

An advertisement of this sort featuring the College of the Holy Cross first appeared in the October 1897 Georgetown College Journal, Volume 26, Number 1 (indicating an IBAC registration in 1896 or 1897) but the advertisement did not describe the hood pattern assigned by the IBAC. The first definitive IBAC list with this information was published in the 27 July 1902 edition of The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper, where Holy Cross’s hood lining was described as purple, not royal purple. This hood assignment was never modified or changed in later IBAC lists.

The Bureau probably assigned Holy Cross a purple lining to avoid duplicating the royal purple hood lining it had already assigned Williams College. But since the officially-assigned purple hood lining of Holy Cross is easily confused with the violet hood lining of New York University, here Holy Cross has been reassigned a hood lining in the college’s correct royal purple color, tailored with velvet fabric rather than silk or satin.