A Touch of Colour: Surveying Variation in American Academic Dress and a System of Categories for Departures

S it was developed more than a century ago, the Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume (ICC) and its successor have been the dominant force in the realm of academic dress in the United States of America. However, colleges and universities began diverging from the Code shortly after its 1896 adoption as a quasi-official standard. Since Harvard University expressed its preference for the Edinburgh shape hood and added a crow’s feet emblem to its gowns in 19021 and Brown University’s adoption of seal brown square caps in 1912,2 institutions have been flouting what was supposed to be a unifying code of dress. These departures from the ICC have continued through to the present day with more and more institutions developing individual schemes of academic dress across the country. Much academic dress—especially at the doctoral level—is far removed from that devised for the original ICC (Fig. 1).3 What follows is an attempt to document these departures for the community of academic dress scholars and to put them into categories, similar to the Groves System.