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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Aloha Shirt Spirit of the Islands by Dale Hope Dale Hope: The Spirit of the Islands in an Aloha Shirt. In 1953, Dale’s mom and dad bought a garment company in Waikiki and Dale remembers wearing his first aloha shirt when he was in the 3rd grade. Everyone he looked up to wore aloha shirts. When he got older he worked with his dad to make the shirts, suggesting they focus on a men’s line and in 10 years they were a respected men’s label. His dad once told him, “You are really in the business of selling art” and he used to sit down with artists and pick the art for the shirts. Through the years they found well-known artists to create shirts with their art. It created a demand for the shirts because people knew the artists and respected their work. While most people might not have been able to afford the artist’s painting, they could afford a shirt with the art on it. Dale sticks to a daily fitness routine because he is motivated by the idea that if he is in good shape today he may have a new opportunity tomorrow. His advice is to be active early in the morning. Immerse yourself in the world’s beauty to start the day and see the sunrise. To Dale, the ocean is what revives him and gives him joy and life. To get up a little extra early and take even a 10-minute walk will change your outlook. Dale is the author of The Aloha Shirt, interviewed hundreds of people related to the industry. Dale was able to interview a lot of people in their 80’s and 90’s to talk about the shirts for his book. It is a beautifully illustrated and fascinating history of the Hawaiian shirt. Please watch this fascinating interview to learn more about Dale Hope and The Aloha Shirt. Aloha. I've spent nearly my entire life around Aloha shirts - from owning and acting as Art Director of Kahala Sportswear, authoring a book, giving lectures and collaborating with companies big and small. Was born at a time when my parents were starting their own garment company here in Honolulu. Two and a half decades later I started working for my Father, and shortly thereafter was in charge of running our family operation. We made shirts under the HRH label in the 70's and 80's. We acquired the name Kahala in the late 80's and changed our company name to Kahala by HRH. Authored the definitive book on the history of the Aloha Shirt in 2000 and have continued to work with companies with projects and collaborations. On this site, you can learn more about the history of the Aloha Shirt, take a look at past collaborations, or view a gallery of some of my favorite designs. Feel free to ask a question about anything related to Aloha Shirts. The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands. A brief and colorful history of how Hawaiian garment manufacturers used kimono cloth to create the souvenir of all souvenirs. Japanese boatmen surf traditional “Hokusai” waves, transporting provisions with towering snow-capped Mount Fuji in the background. Hand- screened Kabe Crepe, no label. Photo: Patagonia Books. The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands is the most colorful and complete book published on the most enduring souvenir ever invented: the Hawaiian shirt. The following excerpt is from chapter two, “Tailor Shops to Factory Pioneers.” In the late 1920s, most visitors to Waikiki beachside hotels wore only one socially acceptable daytime color—white. The fashion was white duck or linen suits for men, dresses for women. Tourists at the big hotels could have a suit cleaned for a mere fifteen cents. In the early 1930’s, imported Chinese pongee replaced the conventional daytime whites. The pongee, a handwoven, crude-textured lightweight tan silk, was fashioned into suits and dresses by tailors in Honolulu. These plain-colored pongee garments were practical and popular and were taken back to the mainland United States. The Japanese and Chinese home sewers, tailors, dressmakers, and dry-goods merchants had established a tradition of using their Asian fabrics in island clothing by importing fine fabrics such as Japanese printed silk and cotton yukata, a summer kimono material, from relatives back home. As of 1922, Hawai‘i’s clothing factories mostly produced plantation uniforms. Then, as Hawai‘i began to change from an agricultural to a service- oriented economy, the emphasis of the island clothing industry shifted from the production of work clothes to sports- and casualwear. The three-button pullover shirt was the predecessor to the more relaxed, open-front aloha shirt. With whimsical outrigger canoes frolicking around a tropical island, this was an early example of a Hawaiian-inspired print. Kabe crepe. Label: Chinese Bazaar, Made in Honolulu, T.H. (Territory of Hawai‘i). Photo: Patagonia Books. There are many stories about the “who” and the “how” of the creation of the first aloha shirt. In a 1966 magazine article, journalist and textile designer Hope Dennis observed, “About thirty-five years ago an astute Hawaiian garment manufacturer (who shall remain nameless to avoid renewing a thirty-five-year old argument) designed the first aloha shirt,” launching what was to become the Golden Age of aloha shirts—the 1930s through the 1950s. In a letter to the editor in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin of September 26, 1984, Margaret S. Young’s recollection of the first aloha shirt placed it in 1926: “A classmate of mine, the late Gordon S. Young (no relation), developed in the early 1920s another pre-aloha shirt which became popular with some of his friends at the University of Hawai‘i. He had his mother’s dressmaker tailor shirts out of the cotton yukata cloth which Japanese women used for their work kimonos. The narrow width material usually had blue or black bamboo or geometrical designs on white. Gordon had a broad figure and it took several widths to make a shirt, which he wore tucked in. He took a supply when he entered the University of Washington in 1926 and created a topic for campus conversation.” Shirley Temple, wearing an early Kabe crepe aloha shirt, playing her ‘ukulele with the local children on Waikiki Beach. Photo courtesy of the Bishop Archives. Ellery Chun, who later became involved in the garment industry, also had early memories of students wearing colorful shirts. His Punahou School classmates were fond of wearing flowery print shirts in the late 1920s. In a Honolulu newspaper article, local residents Bob Lowry and his wife, Sally, recalled how in the late ’20s their classmate James P. Kneubuhl from Samoa showed up at Madame Lester’s School of Ballroom Dancing in Honolulu wearing a printed shirt with a striking tapa-cloth design. The shirt’s material, from the store run by Kneubuhl’s parents in Pago Pago, inspired Madame Lester to have a bolt of similar cloth sent to Honolulu. Hawaiian merchant Koichiro Miyamoto, ‘Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker,’ made shirts from the fabric for the other dance students. Eventually, shirts and undershorts made from the same tapa-influenced material became popular with high school students. Dolores Miyamoto, wife and working partner of Koichiro Miyamoto, also recalled that in the early ’30s famed Hollywood actor John Barrymore came into the store and ordered a colorful shirt made of kimono fabric. Ruth Hirata, then a young Honoka‘a tailor on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, remembers making colorful flowered shirts for Tony and Charles Labrador, who were with Alfred’s Dance Band in Honoka‘a, during the early ’30s. Lila Watumull Sahney, a buyer for the legendary Honolulu retailer Watumull’s East India Store, remembered, “The aloha shirt came into popularity, or began to be noticed more as a fashion item when the haole [caucasian] boys here wore them. They would get Ellery Chun, or Linn’s or Yat Loy, two local tailoring and retail outlets, or Musa-Shiya to make a shirt for them,” Sahney recalled. “And then they’d wear that to a lū‘au.” Koichiro Miyamoto, known as Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker, measures out a length of a beautiful lobster print fabric. Photo courtesy of Dolores Miyamoto. There are school kids, Waikiki beachboys, tailors, and vacationing movie stars, each of whom has a convincing tale regarding the creation of the aloha shirt. In matching the young islanders’ love for colorful clothing with the tourists’ desire to bring home keepsakes of the carefree islands, Hawai‘i’s clothing styles were forever changing. The shirts were first made commercially by Honolulu merchants in tailor shops downtown. Ellery Chun’s family dry-goods store, King-Smith, was conveniently located next door to a tailor shop where visitors went to order custom shirts. In 1932 or 1933 (two different dates are provided in newspaper articles), Mr. Chun decided to manufacture some warm-weather shirts to keep in stock so customers would not have to wait for them. In 1932, Surfriders Sportswear Manufacturing, owned by Ti How Ho, reportedly made and sold its first “Hawaiian” shirts. In the summer of 1934, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his family visited Hawai‘i, sportswear had not yet firmly found its place in Honolulu. The newspaper photographs of a large lū‘au attended by FDR and friends show that “there were no gay Hawaiian garments on the participants as are now worn,” observed Emma Fundaburk, whose 1965 history of the Hawaiian garment industry has become a classic. “The guests at the lū‘au were all wearing leis, but were dressed in regular street or afternoon wear as would have been worn on the mainland at that time.” On April 17, 1935, Pan American World Airways flew its first massive China Clipper from the West Coast of the United States to Honolulu.

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