Buy this product here: Life Of A Pilot Hawaiian Shirt
Home page: TAGOTEE SHOP
Related Articles:
Life Of A Pilot Hawaiian Shirt
guide in 1961’s Blue Hawaii, a “South Seas musical hulaballoo”(Variety). (Paramount Pictures / Getty Images)
One reason men adopted a garment otherwise suited to their sisters’ closet was that rich, famous men wore it. Visitors to Hawaii in the 1930s were invariably wealthy, and before long, aloha shirts were being sold by celebrities whom everyday Americans sought to emulate. American heroes from three-time Olympic swimming champion and surfing pioneer Duke Kahanamoku to singer Bing Crosby were lending their names to particular brands. Those endorsements, says Dale Hope, a historian and the author of The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands, had “a huge effect on people purchasing those shirts.” If you could wear what the man unscathed by the Depression was wearing, it didn’t matter that it was feminine: You looked like someone who didn’t need to worry about his masculine bona fides.
Once the shirt reached stores in the Lower 48, any day laborer could have for just a dollar what before had required an exorbitant trip. A man in an aloha shirt, with its depictions of hula dancers and luaus—“symbol[s] of the comfortable, gay and picturesque,” one journalist put it in 1939—could look the part of the carefree swell.
The notion that Hawaii was a quiet paradise was shattered in 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and makers of aloha shirts, like others in the garment industry, turned to supplying the war effort. When production resumed, Japanese-influenced designs that had been common—featuring cherry blossoms and shrines—temporarily fell out of fashion, supplanted by designs that highlighted Hawaii’s local culture. Service members returning to the mainland from the Pacific made the signature apparel more popular than ever.
By the 1960s, the shirt had become truly ubiquitous. Aloha Fridays were a fixture of a certain kind of workplace, and everyone—from Elvis to the decidedly unhip Richard Nixon—seemed to have an aloha shirt. Over time, perhaps inevitably, it lapsed into the realm of corny suburban-dad-wear.
Visit our Social Network: TAGOTEE Pinterest, Twitter and Our blog Tagotee blogspot
Visit our collection here: Tagotee Shop
Related products
Tagotee