Louisiana State University and A&M College
Louisiana
1860
The original colors of Louisiana State University were blue and white. The first game of football played at the university was on 25 November 1893, against arch-rival Tulane University. The Louisiana State coach and quarterback wanted to decorate their locker room in blue and white but local merchants only had ribbons in the Mardi Gras colors of purple and gold. So those colors were used. This substitution wasn’t completely unusual, because during the spring semester of 1893, the LSU baseball team had worn uniforms in royal purple and old gold in a game –also against Tulane. So after these two games against Tulane, Louisiana State students voted to make royal purple and old gold the new official colors of the university.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): old gold/royal purple (1908-1910); old gold/purple (1911-1931); purple/gold (1934-1935)
Although it may have been assigned earlier, the academic hood lining design for Louisiana State University was first cited in a 1918 Encyclopedia Americana article on academic costume written by Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC). Leonard stated that the university had been assigned a hood lining that was purple above old gold, with the colors divided per chevron. The per chevron division was probably employed to avoid confusion with the hood lining the IBAC had already assigned to Northwestern University (royal purple with a gold chevron). In an IBAC list from 1948 Louisiana State’s old gold has been redefined as gold, but by 1969 the IBAC was once again describing the hood as purple above old gold, divided per chevron.
Anomalously, a 1972 IBAC list said that LSU’s hood lining was purple with a reversed gold chevron. This was no doubt an error carried over from an inaccurate description in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) by Kevin Sheard.
Strangely, the IBAC never described the royal purple of Louisiana State as “royal purple”. This is because by 1927 the IBAC rarely used “royal purple” in its new hood lining assignments, and had changed almost all of the earlier “royal purple” hood descriptions to “purple”. So today it is difficult to know if a particular college or university had been assigned a hood lining with a dark or medium shade of purple.
Here the upper portion of Louisiana State’s hood lining has been corrected to royal purple.
