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The history of Hawaiian shirts

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It’s summer and it’s sweltering (well, at least for me, a pale, pasty prairie boy stuck in Canada’s banana belt). Basically, it’s the perfect time to break out my large and ever expanding collection of colourful, bright (some would say obnoxiously so) Hawaiian shirts.

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Even though my hometown of Saskatoon and Honolulu are about as different as chalk and cheese (one is a tropical paradise while the other has winter 10 months a year, which later makes way briefly for a two-month mosquito season), I’ve always had a fondness for these lightweight, loud, durable and largely cheap (unless you are buying a $400 Dolce and Gabbana designer shirt) national costumes of Hawaii.

Unlike, say, Hawaiian pizza (which for the longest time I considered a crime against pizza though have recently started eating it because it’s the only type of pizza my sons won’t steal from me), or Hawaiian punch (which isn’t even Hawaiian; it was an ice cream topping created in a garage in California in the Thirties, for the love of Pete), Hawaiian shirts –originally known as Aloha shirts – are a true reflection of the island, often adorned with vibrant flowers, waves, surf boards, palm trees, beaches … and sometimes beer bottles and Viking ships.

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Okay, so the shirts may not always be a perfect representation of Hawaiian culture, but nobody bats 1,000, as they say.

While some people have an aversion to the brightly-coloured shirts (these people are known colloquially as mundane, lifeless fuddy-duddies or just killjoys for short), I really can’t get enough of them. Black, pink, blue, purple – it doesn’t matter how luminous and/or gaudy they are, Hawaiian shirts are the bomb. They’re light, comfortable and, as noted scholar/frequent Hawaiian shirt-wearer Arnold Schwarzenegger said during the classic 1987 dystopian future film Running Man, they’re so bright that you could probably get sick on them and nobody would bat an eye.

The history of Hawaiian shirts stretches all the way back to the 1800s, when the island was its own, self-governing monarchy. Dependent on foreign workers to labour in the largely American-controlled pineapple plantations, long-sleeved precursors to the modern-day Aloha shirt were made for these newcomers, who came from places like Japan, Korea, China and Portugal.

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While influenced by brightly coloured Japanese kimonos – the Japanese were the largest immigrant group in Hawaii at the time – the shirts didn’t really look anything like the modern-day Hawaiian shirt in the 19th century, but with the introduction of new fabrics and new technology, even lighter, short-sleeved shirts started being manufactured in the 1920s and 1930s, covered with Hula girls, pineapples and the like.

Then came a brilliant Yale-educated economics major named Ellery Chun.

Chun, a Hawaii native, wanted to make the shirts into an emblem of the island. In the midst of the Great Depression, he decided to turn a Chinese dry goods store into the HQ central of his Aloha Shirt business. In spite of hard times, the shirts started being swept up by locals, by tourists and by surfer dudes, and Hawaiian shirt-making became a big industry on the island.

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After that, war came. While the Second World War, like all wars before and after it, resulted in copious amounts of death, destruction and despair, it also proved to be a pivotal and rather positive moment in the history of Hawaiian shirts.

American soldiers stationed in Hawaii, seeking an attractive alternative from their drab, ugly green uniforms or their ridiculous blue and white sailor outfits, started sweeping up Aloha Shirts like nobody’s business. Following the war, these same soldiers arrived home with their bags bursting at the seams filled with these garish, ostentatious island shirts and mainland America became obsessed (or disgusted) with this new fashion.

Since the end of the Second World War, Hawaiian shirts have become big beyond belief. With the increase in air travel and tourism to Hawaii, the shirts have become iconic gear, a must-buy when anyone sets foot there.

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They have also seeped seamlessly into popular culture – celebrities ranging from Frank Sinatra in the Fifties to Elvis in the Sixties to Alan Alda in MASH in the Seventies to Magnum P.I. in the Eighties to Leonardo DiCaprio and the lead singer guy from

Smashmouth in the Nineties – all bought into the Hawaiian Shirt way of life, making them cool in the figurative sense of that word, further popularizing them around the world.

Nowadays, every store and their dog have a line of Hawaiian shirts ready for summer purchase and the shirts can be found worn in places from New Zealand to above the Arctic Circle.

While the naysayers will always naysay about the shirts’ inherent garishness and ugliness, proponents of Hawaiian shirts such as myself can simply sit back in comfort – with umbrella drink in hand – and laugh at those clueless fools, safe in the knowledge that we’ve already conquered the world.

They’ve even been worn on the international space station, so I suppose the next market we’ll be looking to conquer is aliens.

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