The Aloha Shirt

Yes, I know the photograph above screams middle aged haole. I think it's something about the combination of light and shadow and the light in my eyes causing me to smile awkwardly and create an extra chin. Please read anyway...

A really long time ago, at the beginning of my senior year of high school, our school for some reason decided to have a theme week to promote school pride. I'm guessing that's what it was for anyway. Each day of the designated week had a specific activity which allowed us students to cut loose and be individuals or something like that. Clearly from that enthusiastic and articulate introduction, I didn't quite get the point of it all. Still don't probably. Anyway, for whatever reason, one of the days was "Hawaiian Shirt Day."

Now we've already established elsewhere in this blog that I wasn't the coolest kid in school so of course I didn't own a Hawaiian shirt. I mean, what the heck do I want with a Hawaiian shirt as a 17 year old kid in Connecticut? Well apparently, a lot of other kids in my school (all cooler than me of course) did own such a garment of clothing. And as it turned out, so did my younger sister. So in a rare instance of me caving to peer pressure or whatever, I went to school as a senior for one day stuffed into my little sister's blue and flowered shirt and wore plastic leis that I probably purchased for a quarter or something like that from someone on the student council. I felt like an idiot. Never again, I vowed.

It's now 30 years later (wow, really?) and times sure have changed a lot. So have I, as it turns out. And honestly there's no way I was going to Hawaii and not coming back with at least one Hawaiian shirt, which as it turns out are really called aloha shirts. So in between surfing and hiking and eating and snorkeling and doing whatever else there is to do in Hawaii, I went clothes shopping. A couple of times.

Aloha shirts for sale in one of the many ABC Stores in Honolulu.

There is a lot about the history of Hawaii which is not really recorded fact but has slipped into either folklore or legend, and the creation of the aloha shirt is no exception. The origin of a lot of what goes into an aloha shirt was borrowed from the immigrant Asian workers who arrived in Hawaii in the mid 19th century. That part doesn't seem up for debate. It seems pretty clear that both the patterning and the cloth of these shirts was inspired by traditional Japanese kimonos and the untucked style of wearing the shirts can be traced to Filipino barong tagalog shirts.

Who came up with idea that launched the modern aloha shirt, though, is less clear, although there seems to be little debate that the shirt in its current form was "invented" sometime in the 1920s or 1930s. The original idea may have been conceived of by Gordon Young, a student at the University of Hawaii who started making and selling brightly colored geometrically patterned shirts made of a Japanese yakuza cloth, which was traditionally used to make robes in Japan. The commercialization of the shirt is typically traced to Ellery Chun, a Yale degreed Chinese-Hawaiian businessman working in his father's Honolulu dry goods store.

Chun's idea was to make the shirts into a local style of clothing different from anywhere else in the world. He was the first one to stock this type of shirt in a store and also the first one to advertise the garments as "aloha shirts." Clearly, if only evidenced by that September day of my senior year of high school, the idea worked. These things are serious business in Hawaii. I expected there would be a tourist only trade in the shirts but walking through downtown Honolulu proved me wrong: aloha shirts are business wear in Hawaii without a doubt. It's definitely an idea which changed the world, or at least a little part of it.

So what makes up an aloha shirt? Well, there are a couple of musts and maybe one or two options. First, the shirts are patterned, often quite brightly, with natural or floral motifs, although modern designs may feature tropical drinks, cars or even sports team logos. The shirts feature buttons down their entire front or just halfway (pullover) and traditionally have a pocket on the left breast. The patterning of the shirt should be continuous over the entire garment, including where the shirt buttons and across the pocket. Buttons are sometimes, although rarely these days, made out of coconut shells and in its most traditional form, the pattern is printed on the interior of the shirt, resulting in a somewhat muted look to the shirt.

My Reyn Spooner year of the monkey shirt is (correctly) reverse printed.

If and when you decide an aloha shirt is for you, there are certainly no shortages of options in the islands. The easiest and cheapest place to pick one up is probably at one of the 85 million ABC Stores that can be found in any reasonably populated area of Hawaii (there are actually allegedly only 56 of these stores in the state). The shirts in these stores are appropriately cartoonishly garish and inexpensive. You can probably pick one up for less than $20 if you shop just a little bit.

The majority of the shirts available in tourist souvenir outlets are not likely traditionally Hawaiian. While I didn't check exhaustively, most seemed to be made in China for businesses that were decidedly not local. I decided if I was buying one or two of these, that I should make sure that I bought from a locally based manufacturer with some history in the islands and I'd try to get a variety in the designs that represented different influences in both the appearance and manufacture of the shirts. I ended up finding what I wanted from Reyn Spooner and Tori Richard.

Reyn Spooner was founded in 1962 by Reyn McCullough, an expatriate Californian who relocated to Hawaii in 1959, and Ruth Spooner, a Hawaiian seamstress whose Spooner's of Waikiki store specializing in swimwear opened in 1956. Over the last 50 plus years, the hallmark of Reyn Spooner's aloha shirts has been their more muted, less overly floral reverse printed fabrics which were perfect for someone like me who prefers less loud shirt wear.

The pattern I fell in love with at Reyn Spooner was their limited edition 2016-only year of the monkey design. It's for sure a busy pattern but reminiscent of a traditional paisley design, which connects more to a European / Persian heritage in addition to being uniquely Hawaiian. I love the shirt's design because it appears to be non-repeating (it does repeat, but it's not obvious) and features a variety of different monkeys hidden within the branches and flowers of the tree or plant which forms the body of the shirt. The design is obviously inspired by the Chinese zodiac, which includes a 12 year rotating cycle of different animals associated with each year. The year of the monkey is incredibly personal to me: it's the year (this year) that I first visited Hawaii but it's also the year of my birth (1968). I love it when things work on many levels.

My Tori Richard shirt showing the continuous patterning across the pocket and seams.

So considering my first aloha shirt was in many ways decidedly non-Hawaiian in it's paisley-esque appearance, I was determined to make the second more island-based. I thought it would be ideal if I could find a shirt that was more flowered. I also thought I would love a shirt not made of a polyester blend like the Spooner shirt, since I often find polyester blends soak up the heat from the sun. 

Enter Tori Richard, founded in 1956 by Chicago businessman Mort Feldman (not very Hawaiian I realize) who retired to Hawaii but found retirement didn't suit him. To this day, Tori Richard is a Honolulu based business and that connection to the local economy was important to me. They manufacture clothing for both men and women and their men's line features shirts made from a cotton and silk blend so the shirt I bought from them is incredibly comfortable and light which I like a lot. It's going to be perfect summer wear, when summer gets here in northern Virginia.

I deliberately went floral at Tori Richard, choosing a design with blue and white flowers which to me look like plumeria flowers, a tropical plant that seems to be everywhere in Hawaii and Hawaiian souvenir stores. I love this shirt because it is so Hawaiian to me and is also different in a number of ways from my Spooner shirt. It works for me less on an intellectual level but more on an emotional and reminiscing level. Imagine that...I'm getting all sappy here.

I think if I had a time machine and I'd done everything else I'd wanted to do going forwards and backwards in time, I might drop in on my 17 year old self in Glastonbury, Connecticut and deliver one of these things so I wouldn't have to wear my sister's too-small shirt to school on that one day. I'd also probably want to have a long discussion about self confidence and mellowing out. A lot. But those are discussions probably for another sort of forum, which I will not invite the whole world to witness. For now, I can't wait for things to heat up here in summer so I can remember Hawaii every time I put them on.

Nothing better than some loco moco when you are wearing your brand new aloha shirt.