A day for wearing the loudest shirt in the closet, though in Hawaii the same garment is ordinary work clothing and answers to a different name, the aloha shirt.
Hawaiian Shirt Day circulates on the third Friday in August, promoted by holiday listing sites. Beat of Hawaii went looking for its origin and reported it could not find a credible historical trail.
The man who took the rights to the words "Aloha Shirt" did not use them first. Ellery Chun told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1976 that he had a tailor make a few dozen colorful short-sleeved shirts and put them in his Honolulu store window under a sign reading "Hawaiian shirts". Hawaiian Shirt Day is named for that phrase.
Hawaii mostly does not use it. Writing about the shirts island politicians campaign in, Honolulu Civil Beat called the garment the aloha shirt, never the "Hawaiian" shirt. Chun was recalling it more than forty years later, so it settles nothing about who said what first.
The day also lands on a Friday Hawaii had already claimed. State law sets the third Friday in August as Statehood Day, a Hawaii state holiday. No founder is on record to say why the shirt day took the same rule.
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Nobody can hand you the aloha shirt's birth certificate. Smithsonian puts it plainly: the garment's precise origins are lost to history, and it surfaced in Hawaii in the 1920s or 1930s, probably when local Japanese women adapted kimono fabric for men's shirting.
What survives instead is a pile of competing claims. Dale Hope, who wrote The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands, says no one can agree who invented it.
Chun renamed his family's Honolulu dry goods store King-Smith Clothiers, and dated his own shirts to about 1932 or 1933. Koichiro Miyamoto, working out of his late father's shop, put the words "aloha" shirts into a newspaper advertisement on June 28, 1935.
Ti How Ho said he had sold the first ones in Waikiki a year before that. Rube Hauseman said he made them for the Waikiki beach boys and called them rathskeller shirts.
The islands settled on one word and the continent on another. Linda Arthur, a textile historian, puts a year on the split. The shirts were called aloha shirts from 1936 on, and mainlanders who took up the fashion simply called them Hawaiian shirts, probably because the concept of aloha meant little to them.
Then the shirt went to work. Honolulu let its civic employees wear sport shirts from June through October, starting in 1946. The Hawaiian Fashion Guild sent two of them to every member of the Hawaii House and Senate in 1962, and Aloha Friday followed in 1966.
None of that produced Hawaiian Shirt Day. The garment has a documented history, and the weekly custom has a documented campaign. The annual observance has neither, no founder and no first celebration on record.
The Internet Archive's earliest capture of a listing page for the day dates from September 2022, which is a floor on when it was circulating online rather than a beginning. Beat of Hawaii, reporting from the islands, went looking for the trail and could not find a credible one.
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Linda Arthur traces wearing the shirt outside the trousers to the Filipino barong tagalog. At the time, she says, leaving a shirt untucked was a radical idea.
Arthur says tourists were the ones who adopted the aloha shirt, because it was too wild for the people who lived there. They would not wear the crazy prints, she says: island taste ran to subtle things, and still does.
State law regulates the phrase 'made in Hawaii' on a craft item, and the bar it sets is at least fifty-one per cent of wholesale value added inside the state. Beat of Hawaii notes a shirt can carry a Hawaii brand, be designed there, or be covered in island imagery without necessarily being made there.
Smithsonian puts annual aloha shirt sales by 1940 at more than $11 million in 2020 dollars. Once the shirts reached the Lower 48, a day laborer could buy one for about a dollar.
The late Representative Mark Takai tried to persuade House Speaker Paul Ryan to let the custom into Congress. The Hill reported the refusal: formal attire is required there under a longstanding rule.
So there were five cultures involved: You had a Western body, a Japanese fabric, Chinese tailors, a Filipino style, and it was made in Hawaii.
From my vantage point, an aloha shirt in Hawaii is appropriate for almost every occasion in politics unless it is a formal wedding, funeral, court, or on occasion if you have to deal with someone from the mainland who might not understand.
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One garment, called commercialization by some and a platform by others.
Haunani-Kay Trask, who directed the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, condemned the shirts as "the grotesque commercialization of everything Hawaiian". Hawaii designers including Kuhao Zane of Sig Zane Designs now use the same form to put Hawaiian design in front of a global audience.
Beat of Hawaii reports that an aloha shirt turns up at business meetings, restaurants, weddings and government offices, anywhere a collared shirt would do. Setting a day aside to put one on is therefore a mainland idea, and Beat of Hawaii says the observance sounds a little odd to someone living there.
Beat of Hawaii notes that statehood, annexation and the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom remain sensitive subjects in the islands. So the Friday this day borrows is one that already carries weight there.
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No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing found, so offices, banks and schools keep normal hours.
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