How Can Academical Dress Survive in the Third Millennium?
Transactions of the Burgon Society
Transactions of the Burgon Society
Oliver James Keenan 0
0 University of Oxford
Recommended Citation Keenan, Oliver James (2010) "How Can Academical Dress Survive in the Third Millennium?," Transactions
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Article 6
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How Can Academical Dress Survive
in the Third Millennium?
by Oliver James Keenan
Introduction: the criminalization of ornament
If Austrian architectural scholar Adolf Loos’ maxim that ‘the evolution of culture
marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects’1 was extrapolated to
cover matters sartorial, the existence and development of academical costume
would rapidly be confined to the annals of history, and academical dress would be
obsolete.
Indeed, whilst there is no good reason to assume that Loos’ hypothesis does
apply to costume, academical dress enthusiasts have observed—with a mixture of
sadness and consternation—the decline of academical costume during the last
several decades. There can be little doubt that academical dress is now absent from
such settings as grammar schools and university lecture theatres, where it was once
regarded as the norm. For many, academical costume is regarded simply as an
historical curiosity, the somewhat bizarre attire that garnishes the graduation day
with the quintessential trappings of medieval English ceremonial.
Despite this, special interest groups have emerged with the intention of
promoting the wearing of academical costume over and above its use in graduation
ceremonial, both on a national2 and local3 basis. These groups, whilst not
necessarily promoting the rigorous scholarly engagement with the history, design and
practice of academical dress that characterizes the mission of the Burgon Society,
nevertheless attest to a perceived need actively to encourage the preservation of
academical costume.
Tracing the decline of academical costume
The macroscopic decline in academical dress can be demonstrated by a
microscopic case study of the dismantling of the practice at the University of
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Cambridge—an institution with a well-developed and (reasonably) systematic
scheme of academical dress,4 as well as a strong and living tradition of its use,5 and
one which has kept an official record of the decline, deposited in minutes of
council discussions and amendments to the Statutes and Ordinances.
Academical dress has long been regulated by statute at Cambridge: the earliest
recorded statutes (of Peterhouse) require Fellows to ‘appear in the University
dressed in the proper robes’,6 and more extensive regulations were developed in
both the Elizabethan code of 1570 and by Lord Burghley in 1587,7 further being
influenced by sumptuary legislation.8 Academical dress at Cambridge is regulated
by both College and University Statute, colleges requiring their members to wear
academical dress for such events as formal hall and chapel (often requiring it more
frequently than University Statute), and thus an exhaustive study of these statutes is
beyond the scope of this paper. The primary University legislative texts, the
Statutes and Ordinances, nevertheless provide an important insight into the
developments in design and practice of academical dress at Cambridge and a direct
comparison of the pre-1923 statute9 and present legislation underlines considerable
evidence of deregulation. Academical dress is to be worn by members of the
University in statu pupillari:10
4 For all its unfortunate facets (the treatment of PhDs, inter alia) Cambridge’s extensive
and systematic scheme of academical dress is easily contrasted with the scheme of the
University of Oxford, which unlike Cambridge has not adopted a system of faculty colours:
the lining of doctoral hoods seeming disjointed from those of bachelors and masters.
5 Again, the living nature of Cambridge’s tradition is underscored by comparison with
Oxford’s, which has not been essentially reformed since 1770. Cambridge’s tradition, by
contrast, is somewhat less ossified, being influenced (perhaps subconsciously) by London’s
faculty colours reform, adopting a doctoral faculty colour system in 1889 and later
acquiring a full system of faculty colours, albeit as late as 1934. (See B. Christianson,
‘Lined with Gold’, Transactions of the Burgon Society, 5 (2005), pp. 80–89.)
6 H. P. Stokes, Ceremonies of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1927), p. 43.
7 Ibid., p. 44.
8 Although no sumptuary legislation applied directly to academical dress, its influence
on doctoral robes is alluded to by C. A. H. Franklyn (Academical Dress (Lewes: Baxter,
1970), p. 112), and provisions and implications of sumptuary legislation for undergraduates
and graduates are explored in detail by N. Cox, ‘Tudor Sumptuary Laws and Academical
Dress’, Transactions of the Burgon Society, 6 (2006), pp. 15–43.
9 In 1923, following His Majesty’s granting Royal Assent to the Universities (...truncated)