The Hawaiian Shirt Was Never Supposed to Be Boring

In the late 1920s, a respectable visitor to Waikīkī wore white: white linen suit, white duck trousers, the sartorial equivalent of a polite cough. Then Honolulu tailors started cutting men’s shirts from bolts of brightly printed Japanese fabric, some of it meant for children’s kimonos, and to this day nobody agrees on who did it first. One early seller, Ellery Chun, later said he went looking for the most “brilliant and gaudy” kimono material he could find. The aloha shirt didn’t drift into loudness by accident. It was born that way.

So Who Invented the Hawaiian Shirt?

The long answer involves plantation workers, five cultures, a 95-cent newspaper ad and a lot of people who swear their grandfather got there first. Let’s start before the shirt existed.

Before the Shirt: Kapa and the Palaka

Long before anyone printed a hibiscus on rayon, Native Hawaiians made kapa, a bark cloth beaten from paper mulberry fiber. Western-style shirts arrived with Western ships, and by the end of the 1800s the button-front shirt had settled in.

The first shirt with a real island identity was the palaka, a sturdy blue-and-white check worn on the sugar and pineapple plantations. Textile historian Linda Arthur traces the cloth to a German import; other accounts credit English sailors. According to statistician-historian Robert C. Schmitt, a local firm, Wong’s Products, was reportedly mass-producing palaka shirts by 1921. It was practical, durable, and about as exciting as a Tuesday morning staff meeting. The fun was still a few years away.

The aloha shirt didn’t drift into loudness by accident. It was born that way.

Five Cultures, One Shirt

Arthur, a University of Hawaiʻi professor when she laid this out for the university’s Mālamalama magazine, describes the shirt as a meeting of five influences: a Western cut, Japanese fabric, Chinese and Japanese tailors, a Filipino way of wearing it, and a Hawaiʻi address. No single group gets the credit, which is a very Hawaiʻi way to invent something.

• The fabric. Merchants imported Japanese printed silks and cotton yukata, and some of the brightest bolts were crepe meant for little girls’ kimonos. Which fabric came first (kabe crepe, yukata or a challis) depends on whom you ask.
• The tailors. Chinese and Japanese immigrants owned most of the tailoring shops, according to the National Park Service. In some recollections, Japanese housekeepers also sewed shirts from leftover kimono cloth.
• The untucked hem. Filipino men wore the barong tagalog outside their trousers, and a bright shirttail-out style called the “bayau” was already around. Arthur calls the untucked shirt a radical idea for its time, in an era when men wore coats and ties in the tropics on purpose.

The Paper Trail and the Rival Claims

When the Honolulu Star-Bulletin credited the first commercial aloha shirt to Chun in 1984, readers wrote in with competing memories, as Atlas Obscura recounts. Here’s how the main cases stack up.

Musa-Shiya’s 95-cent ad

The strongest paper trail belongs to Koichiro Miyamoto, who ran a downtown Honolulu shop called Musa-Shiya Shoten and was known as “Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker.” On June 28, 1935, the shop advertised in the Honolulu Advertiser: “‘Aloha’ shirts—well tailored, beautiful designs and radiant colors. Ready-made or made to order…95 cents and up.” Historians widely cite it as the first appearance of “aloha shirt” in print. Miyamoto’s wife and business partner, Dolores, later recalled the actor John Barrymore coming in during the early 1930s to order a shirt from printed Japanese cloth. A recollection, not a receipt, but a good one.

Ellery Chun, marketer

Chun, a Punahou and Yale graduate, came home in 1931 to run his family’s dry-goods store, which he renamed King-Smith Clothiers. Sometime in the early 1930s (sources say 1931, 1932 or 1933) he began stocking colorful ready-made shirts so customers didn’t have to wait for a tailor. The trademarks are where accounts get specific. Schmitt, quoting industry historian Emma Fundaburk, writes that King-Smith “registered the name ‘Aloha’ sportswear in 1936.” The National Park Service and Atlas Obscura date the “Aloha Shirt” trademark to 1937. Chun advertised hard, and the name stuck. Did Chun invent the aloha shirt? The historians are still arguing. Did he understand marketing? Absolutely. Nearly a century later, we’re still talking about him.

Everyone else with a claim

The rest of the list reads like a class reunion. A 1984 letter to the Star-Bulletin remembered Gordon S. Young wearing yukata-cloth shirts in the early 1920s and taking a supply to the University of Washington in 1926. Classmates recalled James Kneubuhl, from Samoa, turning up at a Honolulu dance school in the late 1920s in a tapa-print shirt, which Musa-Shiya then copied for the other students. Rube Hauseman said he made “rathskeller shirts” for Waikīkī beachboys, named for their favorite bar. Ti How Ho of Surfriders Sportswear claimed early shirts too, in 1932 or 1934 depending on the source. And Punahou schoolboys were having kimono-crepe shirts made by the mid-1920s.

Tourists Wanted Loud. Locals Wanted Subtle.

On April 17, 1935, a Pan Am flying boat, the Sikorsky S-42 Pan American Clipper, arrived in Honolulu after a pioneering flight from California, completing the journey in about 18 and a half hours. It was a survey flight, not regular passenger service, according to the Pan Am Historical Foundation; the famous Martin M-130 China Clipper didn’t cross until later in 1935, and paying passengers followed in 1936. Still, Hawaiʻi was getting closer, and visitors wanted something to bring home. Here’s the twist: Arthur says the wildest prints were mostly a visitor phenomenon. Locals tended to prefer subtler shirts, and many still do. The loud aloha shirt was, in part, the one people packed in their suitcase.

From Mount Fuji to Diamond Head

Early shirts carried Japanese motifs, and designers soon localized them. Elsie Das, designing for Watumull’s East India Store, swapped Mount Fuji for Diamond Head and cherry blossoms for ginger, plumeria and hibiscus. John “Keoni” Meigs, who began designing in 1938, drew on tapa patterns he had studied at Bishop Museum. “A lot of kooky things were designed,” he admitted, though he said he tried to stay true to Hawaiian sources. Alfred Shaheen put artists on salary and once chartered a plane to Tahiti, leaving them there for a week for inspiration. Meanwhile, “hash” prints, a pile of every motif that fit, filled souvenir racks. After the war, Japanese-influenced designs fell out of fashion for a time, as Smithsonian notes.

Not every experiment caught on. In the 1940s, Wong’s Drapery made shirts from heavy barkcloth drapery scraps, which Arthur estimates weighed about a pound each. Tourists, she says, never adopted them.

Silkies, servicemen and a president

The classic “silkies” of roughly 1945 to 1955 were usually heavy rayon, not silk, and the fiber soaked up dye into saturated color. Servicemen carried the shirts home after the war. In 1951 President Harry Truman appeared on the cover of LIFE in a tropical print, and the Truman Library holds a Navy photo of his vacation shirts dated that March. It’s not every day the U.S. Navy photographs a man’s vacation wardrobe.

In the 1960s, the reverse print, with the fabric’s softer back side turned outward, became the quieter local option. Arthur associates the look with Reyn’s.

The Shirt That Loosened America’s Tie

Schmitt reports that by 1940, territorial and Honolulu officials were letting employees wear aloha shirts, at least in warm weather; other accounts point to a 1946 city resolution covering June through October. In 1962 the Hawaiian Fashion Guild launched “Operation Liberation,” sending aloha shirts to state legislators. Aloha Friday was a separate push. According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the Guild and the Aloha Week committee began promoting it in 1965 for summer Fridays. Other accounts, including Atlas Obscura’s, date the tradition’s official start to 1966. By 1967 it had gone year-round.

Did Hawaiʻi invent Casual Friday?

Hawaiʻi has a strong claim. Arthur and other Hawaiʻi fashion scholars argue that Aloha Friday spread east and became Casual Friday. Mainland offices also had their own casual days, though, including Hewlett-Packard’s 1980s “Blue Sky Days.” By 1992, the Star-Advertiser notes, Dockers was mailing a guide to casual businesswear to 25,000 human resources directors. And just like that, a shirt born to escape the rules ended up needing permission from Human Resources. You really can’t make this stuff up.

And just like that, a shirt born to escape the rules ended up needing permission from Human Resources. You really can’t make this stuff up.

Kitsch, Then Cool Again: The 1980s Comeback

After the 1950s, the shirt’s reputation slid. TIME wrote in 1985 that its colors had become “synonymous with yokeldom and ugly Americanism,” the uniform of the cartoon tourist. By the time that sentence ran, though, the shirt was back. The same story described an “insouciance that works as a parody of conventional cool,” and quoted Tom Selleck of Magnum, P.I.: “They’re great fun to wear.” In 1988 Selleck gave a red Hawaiian shirt from the show to the Smithsonian. Not bad for a former punchline.

Arthur says that by the ’80s and ’90s, the shirt had become a lifestyle choice for men opting out of corporate conformity. That loud, neon era is the branch of the family tree Rad Palm grew from.

Why the loud shirt keeps coming back

Arthur’s explanation is refreshingly blunt: “People who wear aloha shirts want to be noticed.” Every time someone tames the shirt into a quiet print, someone else reaches for the brightest bolt on the shelf. Which is roughly what Chun said he did in the first place.

Aloha Shirt or Hawaiian Shirt? A Quick Note on Respect

In Hawaiʻi, the words aren’t interchangeable. Alohawear is clothing made in and for the islands, and its prints often carry real stories about plants, places and families. As Arthur notes, “aloha” in Hawaiʻi means far more than hello. Honolulu Museum of Art curator Tory Laitila told Hawaii Business Magazine that some so-called Hawaiian shirts are about as Hawaiian as Hawaiian pizza. Designer Kūhaʻo Zane of Sig Zane Designs has a different take: “I think we should own both terms.” Some Native Hawaiian voices have criticized the commercialization of Hawaiian imagery outright, and that deserves to be taken seriously.

If you want true alohawear, buy it from Hawaiʻi designers. They make beautiful shirts.

Where Rad Palm Fits

Rad Palm didn’t invent the Hawaiian shirt. We weren’t there in the 1930s, and we’re not about to pretend we were.

What we did inherit was an appreciation for the shirts that refuse to blend in. We’re a Tampa Bay brand with a particular weakness for the loud, unapologetic tropical style of the ’80s and ’90s.

Bright colors. Bold patterns. The occasional design that makes someone across the room question your judgment.

Perfect.

Because somewhere between the office dress code and the endless parade of beige, clothing got a little too serious. We think it’s time to have some fun again. If that sounds like you, take a look at our button-downs.

Stay Loud

The aloha shirt started as a way out of white linen and tucked-in formality, shaped by Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Western and Hawaiian influences and argued over ever since. It has been souvenir, uniform, punchline and comeback kid, sometimes in the same decade. The one thing it was never supposed to be is boring.

Coming up next in Dressed for Trouble: how to wear a loud shirt without looking like a cruise director. Until then, find more good stories and bad influences on Rad Reads.