It is not known when the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume assigned an academic hood lining to St. Louis University, but an early description appeared in a 1918 Encyclopedia Americana article on academic costume written by Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the Director of the IBAC. Leonard stated that St. Louis had been assigned a hood lining that was white with a wide blue chevron. A 1927 IBAC list clarified both the shade of the university’s blue chevron as being “azure” and the wide chevron as being “double width”. Since the standard Intercollegiate Bureau chevron was between three and four inches wide, St. Louis’s chevron would have been approximately six to eight inches wide. A 1969 IBAC list reduced St. Louis’s azure blue chevron back down to the standard three- to four-inch width, but a 1972 list from the Bureau contradicted this, describing the university’s chevron as being azure blue and seven inches wide.

The Intercollegiate Bureau had assigned a wide chevron to St. Louis to avoid duplicating the hood the Bureau had already assigned to Drake University (white with azure blue chevron), but the wide chevron was not an ideal heraldic division to use because the color above the chevron tended to be hidden when the hood was folded and worn, creating the appearance of a hood lining divided per chevron. Here this problem has been avoided by using three thin chevrons instead of one wide chevron.