Queen's official colours are gold, blue, and red - tricolour! The familiar tricolour appears on the university's flag, crest, sports jerseys, and on numerous souvenirs, clothes, publications, and promotional material.
The colours were chosen in 1884 by a committee of the president of the Alma Mater Society and the captains of the university's football and soccer teams.
Previously, the only formally designated colours at the university belonged to the soccer team, whose members wore "dark red stockings, white knickerbockers, and dark-blue jerseys." The committee picked red, blue, and gold after weeks of debate because they were the main colours of the university's coat of arms.
One American newspaper wrote of Queen's touring hockey team in 1899, "The visitors presented rather an odd appearance, because their skating costume contains such a combination of colours as to make the players look like animated sticks of candy or skating barber poles."
By early this century, the red, gold, and blue had become a Queen's trademark and its teams had come to be known as the "Tricolour," a nickname superseded only in recent decades by "Gaels."
Most of Queen's faculties and many of its schools also have adopted colours. Arts and Science, Engineering and Applied Science, and Medicine were first to choose to divide up the tricolour, picking - respectively - red, gold, and blue, colours that are most evident in the faculty jackets worn by many students.