Kenyon College
Ohio
1824
According to an advertisement in the 1901 Kenyon Reveille yearbook, Kenyon College had become a client of Cotrell & Leonard, the depository of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), which suggests that the IBAC assigned Kenyon a hood lining in 1900 or 1901. The advertisement does not describe the hood lining pattern the Bureau had assigned to the college.
The first definitive description of Kenyon’s hood is in an IBAC list from c.1912 where the college is stated as having a single color hood lining of mauve-purple. This description is repeated without change in all subsequent Intercollegiate Bureau lists. The IBAC did not reassign Kenyon a royal purple hood lining when the college’s school color changed in 1923 because in 1895 or 1896 that hood lining had already been assigned to Williams College.
Kenyon students were using mauve as their school color by the 1880s, but in 1923 mauve was replaced by “royal purple”. For several decades this darker shade of purple had been used by the college’s athletic teams for their uniforms because it did not soil as easily as mauve.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): mauve (1895-1904); mauve purple (1917-1918); purple (1923-1935)
