Common Threads

ABOVE: The Lokelani Quilt Holoku, part of the Honolulu Museum of Art's Fashioning Aloha exhibit, is a late- nineteenth-century-style dress holoku (gown) that celebrates traditional Hawaii quilts, specifically the lokelani (rose) motif.

 

 

Outside of Islands, aloha wear is the most globally recognizable symbol of Hawaii, except maybe for the pineapple. A bright, tropical design printed in repetition on a lightweight shirt with its tail untucked or onto a loose-fitting dress has near universal, iconographic status: It says Hawaii . Barely a century old, aloha wear is enduring—it might even be eternal. There may be no clothing more recognizably anchored to a place than aloha wear: It's hard to even imagine a Hawaii without it. It is fashion that tells a single story, of tradewinds, swaying palms, rolling waves and happy beachfront memories. 

Or, as Tory Laitila wryly calls this type of aloha wear, "the wearable postcard." Laitila is the curator of textiles and historic arts of Hawaii at the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA). He's the driving force behind Fashioning Aloha , a major exhibition running from April 12 to September 1 showcasing the variety and range, the history and politics, the influences and inspiration of Hawaii's signature style over the past ninety-odd years. But as the exhibition makes clear, aloha wear goes much deeper than the postcard image of Hawaii: It tells the story of a remote Island nation at the nexus of rapid global change, economic development, political upheaval, cultural revival and maybe above all, the love of a place.

Fashion's vagaries have left aloha wear largely alone for most of its existence: In a century when Paris runways have swung between poodle skirts and miniskirts, and menswear traveled from top hats and tails to no shirts, no shoes, no service, the muumuu and the aloha shirt have maintained a kind of consistency that appears to defy fashion gravity. And yet, the tropical prints of aloha wear have been adopted by those very same couture houses, such as Valentino and St. Laurent.  

Gulab Watumull was a pioneer in garment manufacturing in Hawaii. His family started the East India Store, which became Watumull's. In 1955, they acquired Royal Hawaiian Manufacturing, which helped popularize aloha wear around the world.

While the prints have changed over time, aloha wear comes down to two primary styles—the aloha shirt and the muumuu—which have remained remarkably consistent in shape and style over the past century. That said, how do you define aloha wear? Laitila's answer is deliberately broad: "It is clothing from or sourced in or for Hawaii that expresses affection or affinity to Hawaii," he says. 

That covers a lot of ground, to be sure. While the outfits might not change much relative to the runways, the layers of meaning packed into all of that aloha have expanded and evolved over the last century. 

Fashioning Aloha 's interactive design studio, where visitors can create their own aloha wear designs.

 

The origin story for the aloha shirt is quintessential Hawaii: Like any myth, it is a composite, contested and complicated. In the 1930s several tailors asserted authorship for the original aloha shirt—the repeating print fabric, the loose-tail shirt—but no single claim bears out any proof. Aloha shirts have many parents, whoever might have stitched the first into existence; it is a multiethnic mix unique to Hawaii, as so many things in the Islands are.

Aloha wear began with the demands of an island economy. Sourcing cloth in the middle of the North Pacific, half a world away from mills and factories, was a gamble in the days before telegrams, telephones, the internet, steam engines or airplanes. Written orders went out to Manchester, Tokyo or New York by ship; many months later bolts of trade cloth arrived (or didn't) in Hawaii's ports. Tailors got what they got. Part of Hawaii's historic genius has always been its resourcefulness and its ready adoption of the novel, taking up new technologies, fashions and trends, and running with them. 

Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hawaii's sugar and pineapple plantations, ranches, cities and homes were growing, and along with them the demand for sturdy yet lightweight clothing. The prints and fabrics tailors received might have been a surprise, but so long as they were useful, cool and functional, they'd make do with what they got. So maybe it was a repeating yukata print, a lightweight cotton kimono cloth from Japan, that became the first aloha shirt. Or perhaps it was a pareu print, an English fabric imported to Tahiti in solid colors with large, white floral motifs. Aloha wear grew out of a cascade of choices and accidents made by merchants, millers, tailors and consumers. 

As tourism took off with the rise of air travel in the 1930s, aloha wear too took flight. What were once functional uniforms for a remote, agrarian economy became a souvenir fashion icon recognizable around the world for nearly a century. 

 

The exhibit was inspired by the personal collection of Linda Arthur Bradley, professor emerita from the University of Washington and prior to that a professor of apparel and product design and merchandising, and curator of historic costume and textiles collections at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (as well as Laitila's professor when he was an art history graduate student at UH). Bradley donated thirteen items and loaned three to HoMA, ranging from an Alfred Shaheen holoku (gown) to a Keoni aloha shirt from the 1940s to a vintage Waltah Clarke shirt from the 1960s.

The HoMa exhibit is organized by themes rather than a sequential history; the aloha wear on display is categorized into visual motifs, such as floral or Asian prints, but also into items that give a sense of Hawaii as a place, both unto itself and also as a part of Polynesia, recognizing the role that pareu fabric and kapa (bark cloth) played in the emergence of distinctive aloha imagery. 

Japanese fabrics were most easily available to earliest aloha wear tailors; common prints might be birds, landscapes, flowers or other East Asian themes such as dragons or woodblock-print treasure ships. For the exhibit, these items are showcased in relief against artwork that might once have inspired them, such as original prints from the Japanese printmaker Hiroshige, donated to the museum by writer James Michener. 

Floral abundance and Hawaiian hospitality was a connection encouraged by the tourism industry's early publicists: Hibiscus and plumeria prints alluded to the lei bestowed on visitors' necks upon disembarking in the Islands during the "boat days" era beginning in the late 1920s, a period when interest in the Islands was spreading across the United States, promoted in part by traveling Hawaiian musicians and by the new medium of film. Each shirt and dress printed with plumeria, pineapple or palm frond then went back to Kansas, California or Connecticut, telling and selling a story of a tropical paradise. A place to return to—and to spend on. 

 

As manufacturers began to employ Island artists to design prints, the iconography on aloha wear expanded to include themes specific to Hawaii. Soon there were shirts celebrating impossibly muscled Waikiki surfers, ukelele, outrigger canoes, hula dancers in gravity-defying grass skirts—images that reflected the Pacific idyll that visitors had come seeking. 

But what aloha wear was not for the first fifty years of its existence was Hawaiian. Native culture had been largely omitted from the Island fairy tale that aloha wear alluded to. It was mostly marketed toward the visitor and the transplant, not the Natives. When locals and Native Hawaiians did don aloha wear, it was mainly for special occasions, largely because of the expense; for Island people, aloha wear was like their Sunday best. It wasn't until the 1970s, as Native Hawaiians became energized to preserve and perpetuate Hawaiian language and culture, that aloha wear evolved to include truly Indigenous influences; the Hawaiian Renaissance saw a growth in prints celebrating kapa, kahili feather standards, Hawaiian quilts or traditional everyday objects and tools such as poi pounders. 

"From its inception, aloha wear was made for the tourist community," says Andrew Reilly, a professor of fashion design and marketing at UH Manoa. "It represents really nothing Native Hawaiian in it." For Fashioning Aloha, HoMa pointed to this absence: The exhibit shows how a tourist souvenir can evolve into a wearable political statement for Native Hawaiians. 

Nothing can ever be truly suppressed, as any Freudian will tell you. While it might take a keen eye to recognize Native influences in the earliest examples of aloha wear, they have always been there. Repeating patterns on locally made fabrics exist in the very earliest examples of Hawaiian garments we have: kapa. Prior to European contact, Pacific Islanders wore layers of bark cloth—stripped from the tree, soaked, pounded, dried and then stamped in geometric patterns with natural dyes in a range of colors, from the bright yellow of olena (turmeric) juice to the earthy red of alaea (clay).  

So, a foundational notion of repetitive printing is indigenous to Hawaii clothing, as the exhibit demonstrates with several antique kapa pieces, both stencil-printed and freehand-painted. Captain Cook wrote about kapa in his journals just after he arrived in Hawaii in January 1778: "The malo [loincloth] worn by the men is a long strip of thick cloth, ten or twelve inches wide, and curiously stained with red, black and white." 

Today, curators and designers alike hope to make Native influences explicit. Aloha wear might now integrate kapa designs or reprint broadsheets from nineteenth-century Hawaiian language nupepa (newspapers) or include explicit statements about the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. This kind of aloha wear "is not about tourism," says Native Hawaiian designer Kanoelani Davis of Pomahina Designs, whose prints are inspired by indigenous Hawaiian plants, such as ohia lehua and ohai, "but to share moolelo [stories], preserve our culture and resources, and to retain the language and lost names." 

 

There are academic and pop histories of the aloha shirt, most notably by local historian Dale Hope, that cite these early Native influences. You'll find his coffee-table tome The Aloha Shirt in hotel suites throughout the state, but missing from this history or given only glancing treatment is the history of aloha wear for half the people who wore it: women. 

The evolution from a breezy, printed housedress to an Aloha Friday staple is not hard to trace in the muumuu. Early nineteenth-century missionaries insisted God-fearing Native women must be fully clothed. The earliest muumuu—a long, loose frock—was created to mimic the undergarments of missionary women. For the alii (chiefly) women, wearing Western clothing became a way of displaying wealth and status; the muumuu was the underdress for women, and the holoku, or gown, was the unstructured outer garment. (One etymology of the word holoku suggests it may be a portmanteau of two Hawaiian words: holo, to go, and ku, to stop, words that Native seamstresses might have used when running needle and thread or, later, turning the wheels on early sewing machines.)

Elegant and tailored today, holoku are seen far less often than muumuu; they're typically worn only on formal occasions—a prom, wedding or cultural event such as the annual Merrie Monarch hula festival. On first look, the holoku and its younger sister, the holomu, share the corsetry and internal structure of a couture gown. The holoku is said to imitate the long, flowing train of the Hawaiian alii. While trailing yards of fabric behind you looks fantastic onstage or in photos, it's awkward for walking around. So in 1949 the holomu became the compromise: a tailored floral gown with a wide box pleat at the back that offers almost all the fun and flourish of a train. You feel like royalty when you wear it. 

If the overthrown Hawaiian kingdom is indirectly referenced in the holoku and holomu, today's aloha wear is often openly political: The mayor of Maui County, Richard Bissen, attended a press conference after the Lahaina fires wearing an aloha shirt with the word "kue" printed on it, which can mean oppose or resist. Hawaii's US Representative Jill Tokuda similarly wore a kue-print top to a hearing in Washington DC regarding the Navy's catastrophic fuel leak at Red Hill, which contaminated Oahu's drinking water. The print has an explicit historical connotation, according to the shirt's designer, Kenneth "Aloha" Victor: The repeating design includes signatures from what is known as the Kue Petitions. In the late 1890s the majority of the Hawaiian kingdom opposed the annexation of Hawaii by the United States; 95 percent of the Native adult population signed the Kue Petitions, which were hand-delivered to the US Senate.

 

Petition prints are recent arrivals in aloha fashion, but aloha wear has historically been political if not so politicized, says Christen Tsuyuko Sasaki, whose grandparents founded Malihini Sportswear, an aloha wear firm once seen in retail stores such as Lord & Taylor and Sears. The mass tourism that gave rise to aloha wear in the wake of World War II is inextricably tied to America's Cold War-era military buildup, Sasaki says. Tourism is Hawaii's largest industry, representing about a quarter of the local economy, but the US military comes in a close second, at 20 percent. The engine for the explosive growth of tourism was America's military, writes Sasaki in "Threads of Empire: Militourism and the Aloha Wear Industry in Hawaii." Pink sunsets and tiki drinks printed across a shirt can be read as a fantasy cloaking the reality of Hawaii as a strategic asset in projecting American power, according to Sasaki. In other words, aloha wear was an object of beauty both created by and used to sell "militourism," as she calls it. 

The dark side of aloha wear went even darker in recent years, says Laitila. The extremist Boogaloo movement adopted Hawaiian shirts ahead of the January 6 attacks on the Capitol. Their rationale requires several leaps of logic that few but insiders would make: A second civil war is on the horizon, and it's referred to as the "boogaloo." Boogaloo is a party from the 1984 film Breakin' 2 Electric Boogaloo, a name that sounds vaguely like "big luau." Hawaiian shirts signal membership in anti-government militias, and the convoluted verbal association helps stymie law enforcement and social media sites that track the growth of terrorism online. 

So aloha wear can go from marketing a tourist paradise to an object of pride for a marginalized Native community to signaling insurrection and still be universally recognizable as a symbol of Hawaii. It's capacious enough to contain all the contradictions and connotations of Native rights, Hawaii history, royalism, anti-colonialism, militourism and white power militias, but at heart it is also a beautiful and unique sartorial art. "The thing about Hawaiian prints is always about the art-it is not just something to catch the eye—the backside of an aloha shirt is like a canvas," says Bradley. Regardless of its darker appropriations, "Aloha wear is for those willing and desiring to honor our culture," says Davis, "regardless of who you are and where you're from."

 

For Laitila the most important piece in the HoMA exhibit is not a garment but a piece of upholstery cloth. An ulu (breadfruit) print from 1936 is one of the fine examples of a Hawaii motif that was originally designed for something else—furnishings—but then repurposed for garments. It was made by Elsie Das, who created fabrics for Watamull's East India Store, owned by her brother-in-law. Das "can lay close claim to being the originator of the aloha print," according to a March 24, 1950, feature in the Honolulu Advertiser. (Das is also the mother of World War II camouflage for US Army engineers, and historians say the entire war in the Pacific, from Honolulu to Wake Island, was draped in Das designs.) Her floral creations represent the kind of multiethnic, multipurpose, improvisational yet intentional mix that is both particular to Hawaii and that aloha wear celebrates. 

As far as the curator's personal favorite, Laitila singles out an early-1980s holoku collaboration between designers using the original Lahaina Sailor print, inspired by the bandannas mariners wore when they docked at Lahaina. The current print features the Hawaii state flower (yellow hibiscus), the state bird (nene), the state tree (kukui) and the Hawaii state flag. "The original garment is a partnership between two designers, Reyn Spooner and Bete Inc., and references nineteenth-century Hawaii," says Laitila. 

It is a fact of Hawaii life that aloha shirts are appropriate for every social occasion, from casual surf wear as a cropped cover-up—the Hapa Jac—to black-tie wear among the state's mightiest power players. There are very few gatherings in the Islands unbefitting for aloha wear. Laitila personally likes a long-sleeve pullover aloha shirt, of which there never seem to be enough, and he would love to see a return of the aloha sport coat, an example of which is in the HoMA exhibit. This writer thinks Watteau-backed, body-conscious holomu that make a girl feel like royalty deserve a revival. 

The tradition of donning aloha wear for work on Aloha Fridays is a thing of the past now that aloha wear is appropriate every day. Aloha Fridays (a precursor to the "casual Fridays" in workplaces on the US continent) began in 1966, inspired in part by the president of Bank of Hawaii, Wilson P. Cannon Jr., coming to work wearing aloha shirts on Fridays. Aloha Friday caught on, and the local fashion industry was more than happy to produce office-appropriate aloha wear while promoting clothing made in Hawaii. Innovative brands like Sig Zane, Roberta Oaks, Tori Richard and Reyn Spooner are now beloved the world over and favorites in Island workplaces. 

Ahead of the exhibition, HoMA asked Hawaii residents to send in pictures of themselves and their family in their favorite aloha outfits, which were then projected on the walls and posted to the museum's Instagram feed. The museum was flooded: Locals submitted shots of aunties in antique muumuu and of entire families jumping in the air wearing the same cheerful floral prints. Each image was a joyous multigenerational expression of aloha—and that, more than any encoded political message, is the essence of aloha wear.