Bates College
Maine
1855
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) was affiliated with the academic costume firm Cotrell & Leonard, and one of the partners in this firm, Gardner Cotrell Leonard, was also the Director of the IBAC. So one way to estimate the date a school was assigned a hood lining pattern by the IBAC is to note when that school was first advertised as being a client of Cotrell & Leonard.
Bates College first appeared in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the December 1895 edition of the Yale Literary Magazine, published very soon after the final draft of the Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume was completed on 16 May 1895. This suggests that the advertisement was listing some of the pre-Code clients of Cotrell & Leonard rather than institutions that had already adopted the Code. Bates was also mentioned as a client of Cotrell & Leonard in the 1896 Illio yearbook of the University of Illinois, and the November 1897 edition of The Bates Student contains an advertisement from Cotrell & Leonard, so it seems reasonable to conclude that Bates was registered with the IBAC at some point between 1896 and 1897.
Bates College students adopted garnet as the school color in 1877. Black and/or white are added as accent colors when needed but they are not “official” colors of the college.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): garnet (1895-1931); garnet/black (1934-1935)
None of these advertisements described the actual color pattern used in the college’s hood; this was first cited in an IBAC list from 1927. In that list the hood lining color for Bates was described as garnet, a single color design that was repeated in all subsequent IBAC lists without change. Unfortunately, it was a duplication of the hood the IBAC first assigned to Union College in 1896. To resolve this problem, here the garnet-colored hood lining for Bates has been tailored from velvet fabric instead of silk or satin.