University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Illinois
1867
In the 1800s, the University of Illinois used a number of different school color combinations (cardinal and silver, blue and white, orange and black, gold and black, and green alone) before a committee chosen by the president of the college selected orange and navy blue in 1894. That said, many University of Illinois souvenirs from the early 1900s used a lighter shade of blue than navy. The reason for this is not known.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): black/gold (1895); navy blue/orange (1896-1900); orange/navy blue (1902); orange/blue (1904-1935)
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 Bureau is to note when that school was first advertised as being a client of Cotrell & Leonard.
The University of Illinois first appeared in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the 1897 “Ole Miss” of The University of Mississippi yearbook, indicating an IBAC registration date for Illinois’s hood in 1896 or 1897. The advertisement did not describe the actual color pattern used in the university’s hood; this was first cited in an Intercollegiate Bureau list from 1918. In that list Illinois’s hood was described as navy blue with two orange chevrons, a lining pattern that was repeated in all subsequent IBAC lists without change.
The details are not certain, but the Bureau probably used this pattern to avoid duplication with the hood that might have been assigned to Columbian University at that time (navy blue lining with an orange chevron). Columbian became George Washington University in 1904 and adopted new school colors of blue and buff. The University of Virginia was later assigned Columbian’s former hood.
