How many people did it take to invent the aloha shirt?
Just as today’s social media can create urban legends overnight, stories of old were picked up and retold over and over until they passed into legend.
Chinese-Hawaiian businessman and Yale graduate Ellery Chun is largely credited for coming up with the first “aloha shirt” in 1936 as a way of boosting his family’s Honolulu dry goods shop, King Smith. Because of his business acumen, he not only coined, but also copyrighted the catchy name.
But, if you ask Dale Hope, author of the definitive history, “The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands,” the answer is more complicated, involving anyone from Japanese immigrants to schoolboys to marketing raconteurs.
The bottom line is that anyone could have made a one-off “aloha shirt” and claim to be the first, but it took much more work and willpower to create a market and industry.
In honor of Hawaii’s diverse fashion scene and in collaboration with Hawaii Fashion Incubator, Ala Moana Center has opened Fashion Annex, a series of free exhibitions celebrating different facets of the fashion industry.
A new exhibit will be featured every two months through Dec. 24. The first, continuing through Aug. 25, is “Aloha Made: A Snapshot of Hawai‘i Fashion,” curated by Hope and fellow vintage collector and designer Deb Mascia.
“The show is a tribute to all the people who played a part in the evolution of the aloha shirt. They all had an impact, from the artists to the seamstresses to shopkeeper,” said Hope, who grew up in the industry. His father owned Sun Fashion of Hawaii, and Hope later became creative director of Kahala Sportswear before launching his vintage aloha shirt collection, Hope for Man.
Mascia is the founder and owner of local boutique-turned-pop-up-shop, Mu‘umu‘u Heaven, known for repurposing castoff vintage aloha wear into contemporary designs.
The inaugural show features a mix of apparel sourced from Bailey’s Antiques and Aloha Shirts, Mascia’s muumuu collection and Hope’s collection of vintage aloha shirts, with designers covering a who’s who of fashion over the decades, beginning with the state’s initial fashion boom in the 1950s, coinciding with the growth of Hawaii’s travel industry.
Among designs featured are early shirts by Kahala, Alfred Shaheen, Waltah Clarke’s and Sun Fashions of Hawaii, leading up to such contemporary designers as Manaola and Manuheali‘i, showing Hawaii fashion is not only alive and well, but also evolving to be relevant in a global marketplace.
According to Hope, the aloha shirt story started with a love of Japanese textiles. As early as the 1920s, schoolboys at Punahou School fell in love with the textiles printed with images of Mount Fuji and pine trees that they found at the Japanese dry goods stores, and would buy yards of the fabric to have their moms’ dressmakers sew into shirts.
After the first edition of Hope’s book came out in 2000, he heard from Rube Hauseman, who claimed to have started promoting aloha shirts before Chun. Seeking out the trendsetters and other influential people of the day, he distributed his shirts to beachboys and herded them down to the Alexander Young Hotel’s Rathskeller Bar after work, where they would mix with a crowd that included celebrities like Bing Crosby and musicians like Gabby Pahinui. It created demand for his cool, comfortable shirts among tourists ready to ditch their hot suits.
Then there was the story of seamstress Dolores Miyamoto, the wife of Musa-Shiya tailor, Koichiro Miyamoto. She told Hope that John Barrymore walked into the store in the early ’30s and asked to have a custom shirt made of Japanese kabe crepe fabric. She remembered the order because up until that that moment, the couple had never made a printed shirt.
Hope recently launched the Aloha Shirt Club as a Facebook page to connect the community of aloha shirt lovers.
Mascia began collecting aloha shirts and muumuu while growing up in Australia, and remembers being amazed by the long distance they traveled to catch her collector’s eye.
“I don’t know how they made it to Australia, but if I see something beautiful and it’s a bargain, I have to have it. It’s gonna take a 12-step program to make me stop.”
She’s collected a thousand vintage Hawaii fashion labels that she hopes to sew into a dress one day, and Hope said even the labels are a source of stories and mystery for other fashion detectives to pursue.
“I know most of them, but some were made in the ’30s by the early guys and I don’t really know who they were,” Hope said.
———
Ala Moana Center’s Fashion Annex will open from noon to 5 p.m. daily through Dec. 24 in the Mauka Wing next to the Kahala store.
