Aloha, American Style: Hawaiian Style & Steve McGarrett
I have an invitation which begins “Wear your Hawaiian shirts, make your own hula skirts and savor an evening of island fun featuring a kahlua pig roast.” It's not a brochure from a stay on Oahu, but the words on a flyer for a bank-sponsored pic-nic in Dillon, Ohio. While it’s possible one could have "Dillon, Ohio Days" in Waikiki--where the people wear bowling shoes at weddings and whisper to each other that the most powerful contraception is "prayer" but the “Ohio shirts” will likely be less fetching. Hawaiian shirts, after all, are not souvenirs of Hawaii as much as a pastoral recollection of the fun associated with a mythical "Tiki" Hawaii. “Hawaiian shirt days” are now a common workplace initiative, along with Western Days, intended to briefly lighten the formality of the office--an initiative otherwise dubbed by many employees as “Stupid Shirt Days” and / or “Stupid Hat Days.”
The Hawaiian shirt (or Aloha shirt) is perhaps the most conspicuous piece of casual apparel in the American wardrobe: the very frontier of casualness. "Tacky" and "loud": something that announces its love of vacation and tests the very limits of what American casualness entails. Thus many workplace dress codes which endorse "casual wear" clearly stipulate "no Aloha shirts." An affront to formality and all associated cliches of bad taste, the Aloha shirt is, by reputation, not hip or dangerous--but quirky, off-beat, campy, kitschy, Margaritavilley. respectable only in its proper fraternity or day of the week.
Many mainland school dress codes, apparently, deal with the possibility of Aloha shirts being worn on days that have been officially designated as “Hawaiian.” Pennington Academy, a New Jersey private school, strictly bans Aloha shirts from its campus and at Milton Christian Academy, where the dress code explicitly targets clothes showing a student’s body by “tightness or shortness,” the Aloha shirt is definitely out as sure as “cult, satanic or gang related” apparel--even though Hawaiian shirts have never been accused of tightly showing off the body. The Aloha shirt is associated with a kind of outrageous body acceptance and denial--not caring what people think and caring deeply about aesthetic statement. In an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is worried a Hawaiian-shirt wearing Bart is gay, Homer says, “only two kinds of people wear Hawaiian shirts, gay guys and big fat party animals--and Bart doesn’t look like a big fat party animal.”
Whatever the cultural space afforded the Aloha shirt--bright and as elaborate as an antique Japanese print and as common as a terri-cloth halter top in Wal-Mart--the Hawaiianess of the Aloha shirt is always its context, the concept or idealization of a version of Hawaii always the implication behind its durability.
The Aloha shirt is not Hawaiian. Hawaiian dress is a matter of a more typically historicized problem with body acceptance. The first wave of missionaries to the islands were appalled by the "heathen nakedness" of native Hawaiians. The first examples of western clothes the native Hawaiians would have worn were all modest and conservative English clothes. Though some have suggested the signature gesture of the Aloha shirt is anticipated by a native custom of taking drab garments supplied by missionaries and adding colorful motifs to them (The mu’muu as a bright version of the Mother Hubbard dress) the Aloha shirt was not invented in the fields of the plantations.
In the 19th century, as cheap English cotton drygoods began making their way to the South Pacific, Tahitians began wearing the pareo, a large rectangle of bright cloth with large white floral emblems. Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings often feature locals wearing these pareos. Gauguin himself eagerly took to wearing the cloth and wrote in his Tahitian Journal (Noa Noa), “A princess entered my chamber where I lay, half-ill, on the bed, dressed only in a pareo--what an outfit to address a woman of rank.”
Also, before the colorful Aloha shirts would be associated with the Hawaiian islands, a woven cotton plaid material favored by paniolo cowboys called palaka was the original Hawaiian shirt. This simple check plaid (usually white and blue) was favored by farmers, plantation workers, and would ironically become the basis of many Hawaiian school uniforms. The palaka is still sometimes called the “real Hawaiian shirt” and, as far as dress becomes a specific act of representation, is favored by those who want to stress authentic Hawaiianess as opposed to a more touristy Hawaiianess. The more restrained Aloha shirts of service workers in Hawaii, from hotel clerks to waiters, often forgo the silky texture and colorful design of the Aloha shirt in favor of a sturdier cotton blue and white design which mixes palaka with pareo.
What would eventually be known as the Aloha shirt was born in Chinese and Japanese tailor shops in downtown Honolulu in the late 20s / early 30s. While the claims of invention and ownership are too varied for me to value one over the other, it is clear that skilled sewers in Honolulu working with imported Japanese silks began making stylish short and long sleeved print shirts which were popular with University students and with tourists. Mainlanders too began seeing these unique bits of apparel and began bringing them home.
In the 1930s, American popular culture began recognizing Hawaii in a more significant way. Bing Crosby’s movie Waikiki Wedding was the biggest hit of 1936 and Crosby won an academy award for his rendition of “Sweet Leilani.” Crosby helped popularize Hawaiian songs like “Blue Hawaii” (which Elvis would re-energize in the 1960s) and furthermore helped popularize the notion of Hawaiian style as essentially laid-back and relaxed. Don Ho, who would become Hawaii’s most well-known singer, essentially worked the same angle as Bing. Hawaii's still vibrant and indigenous music scene remains dedicated to its sense of the unstressed life--unsurprisingly adopting some of the musical notes of reggae and creating a unique hybrid known as "Jawaiian." Hawaii was not meant to be a place of suits and collars but a beach cocktail party: the aloha shirt serves an immediate function of the need for Hawaii itself to provide the allure of exotic allowance neatly with the functionalist comforts of America. California--but with ukulele songs.
The so-called golden age of Aloha Shirts comes along with flight tourism and the increased search for the cinematic Hawaii. In Honolulu, shirtmakers such as King-Smith Clothiers, Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker, and Musa-Shiya Shoten all created what are now among the most valued examples of vintage shirts. In design, they are not remarkably different than the ones that currently are stacked up in every Waikiki gift shop.
The early shirtmakers strategically recognized the potential in their product and quickly adjoined it to clever advertising schemes and began attracting the interest of Mainland “sportswear” manafacturers. The war quickly ended any idea that Hawaii would become the textile giant of the Pacific but after the war, as polyester materials began to be used more widely in the textile industry, Aloha shirts began to appear more regularly stateside and, despite their “exotic” announcements, became as common as sneakers or baseball hats.
After Hawaii became a state in 1949, and Thor Heyderdahl completed his polynesian Kon Tiki expedition, more affected Hawaiian-Polynesian styles became a popular fad in the U.S. Backyard luaus complete with Aloha shirts and leis were commonplace a new generation of American drinkers who dutifully learned all about cocktails with names like Fog Cutter, Suffering Bastard and Missionary’s Downfall. Musicians like Martin Denny, Les Baxter and Arthur Lyman were creating hit records providing a jazzy ambiant South Seas sound that would eventually be known as “Exotica.” Moreover, Chinese restaurants all over America were presenting themselves in decor and spirit as sophisticated polynesian "tiki clubs." Thus, Aloha shirts, exotic rum drinks, and polynesian decor would eventually become the staples of what would eventually be known as "Tiki Culture."
In a way, the Aloha shirt has had nowhere to go since the 50s: it has been an easily available item of American sportswear ever since. However, the pastoral configurations of Hawaii in the form of outrageous Tiki bars and backyard luaus have long since faded in popularity. It’s been awhile since a celebrity has put out an album of Hawaiian standards--a de rigeur gesture of the Hawaii-happy 50s that saw Island efforts from Dean Martin, Burl Ives, Steve Lawrence, and Tennessee Ernie Ford.
The movement of contemporary Tiki Culture, exemplified by magazines like Tiki News, is an attempt to reconnect with the mainland’s 1950s version of Hawaii. An ironic, nostalgic recapitulation of an already ironic, nostalgic Hawaii. What seems to be celebrated is an innocence of taste, where the simulation of the exotic is preferable to the exotic because it’s transportable and commercially reproduceable. Much like a casual Friday, all the Hawaii of the bungalow basement requires is a wacky shirt and a bottle of rum. The tiki aficionado therefore appreciates the fakeness of Hawaii. There is no such thing as a tiki bar in Hawaii: “tiki” exists only as a simulacrum--more authentic in Upstate New York than it is in Tahiti. If a true tiki aficionado found themselves in Honolulu, they would go to Nashville Waikiki, a so-called “authentic country bar,” finding its simulacra of roadhouse America much more appealing than the real palm trees, the real beaches and so on.
Aloha shirts likewise have more to do with the enlistment of Hawaii to enable one's party mode as one gets older. If not ethnically Hawaiian, the Aloha shirt’s factual genesis is a perfect example of the plural Hawaii.
In movies and TV, Hawaiian authenticity has often been maintained by location shooting. While there are many shows set in New York but filmed in Los Angeles, none that I know of would set a show in Hawaii without aiming for the scenery. Hawaii Five-O aired from September 1968 to April 1980, more recently supplanted by NYPD Blue as the longest continuous-running police series in U.S. television history and filmed entirely on location around Honolulu. Jack Lord played the savvy, helmet-haired, tough cop Steve McGarrett. It was a pretty straight cop series with very little backstory inserted into the plots. In its lingo and storylines, the anxieties of the time are often drawn through the plots: the generation gap, cold war, drug use and Vietnam. Jack Lord’s Steve McGarrett (one of the Steves in the Tao of Steve) had a unique swagger which remains the series’ signature. His catchphrase “Book ‘em Dan-o” is one of TV’s most durable catchphrases. McGarrett had a way of showing imperious contempt for the freaks and weirdos of the seventies that isolated him as a force to be reckoned with. As one commentator put it “no one could sneer groovy or hip like McGarrett, not even Spiro Agnew.”
In an episode from their third season called “Trouble in Mind” Nancy Wilson plays a heroin addicted singer looking for a fix. Tension builds as it’s known there's a batch of arsenic-laced heroin on the island, killing several junkies along the way. As with all episodes where McGarrett shows off his knowledge of drug slang, it’s a classic Five-O, where the composer of the main theme, Morton Stevens plays a drummer who dies from using the bad dope in the opening scene. There’s also a very disturbing scene with a young kid, no more than 10, who claims to be a heroin addict. When the kid is berated for his habit, the kid says "that’s just fuzz jive."
Unlike Thomas Magnum of Magnum PI who fully endorsed the casual code of Hawaiiness with his khaki shorts, ballcap and red aloha shirt, Steve McGarrett was rarely seen outside of one of his tailor made dark suits in the length of the whole series. His fashion sense, rather than being strictly by the book is actually quite dandy: esp. with his coiffed hair and seemingly-touched eyelashes. McGarrett’s suits are not the suits of a High School principal but the secure gesture of a feminine understanding exemplified by James Bond but seen in other macho dandies like Puff Daddy or Don Cherry. In the final season of Five-O, McGarrett once went with a full pink suit--a choice which continues to bring consternation to the show’s fans who see in McGarrett an ideal of masculine stoicism in the face of a changing world and demands to “lighten up.”
On the occasions where McGarrett is forced undercover and must mingle with island fun-lovers, he will concede and wear an aloha shirt, but a full-sleeved one--which he will usually accessorize with a nice white ascot--And one must applaud anyone for hanging tight with the ascot. It's a weird look. Seeing McGarrett trying to look casual is discomforting, like seeing a senator in flip flops. The reason why the dress code on Hawaiian shirt days at the office becomes mandatory is because no one wants to be the only one who took the request seriously.
What may be interpreted as an imperial interest on McGarrett’s part, a refusal to concede to island custom or authority (McGarrett is never one for the superstitions of old Island customs), may better be seen as some actual conservative modesty. A belief in covering the body. I can’t verify the rumors that Jack Lords’ arms were covered by naval tattoos which made it impossible for him to wear short sleeves on prime time TV, but Lord’s gentle modesty is easy to pick up on. Rather than being a heartless enforcer, Lords was a gentleman who, in his spare time, painted and talked about the singular virtue of love. But the Hawaii of the Five-O office was not where Bing Crosby crooned--it's a place of drug dealers, serial killers and political assassinations. Steve McGarrett does not drink, does not hang on on the beach and for those who work with him there are no casual days.
The Hawaiian shirt (or Aloha shirt) is perhaps the most conspicuous piece of casual apparel in the American wardrobe: the very frontier of casualness. "Tacky" and "loud": something that announces its love of vacation and tests the very limits of what American casualness entails. Thus many workplace dress codes which endorse "casual wear" clearly stipulate "no Aloha shirts." An affront to formality and all associated cliches of bad taste, the Aloha shirt is, by reputation, not hip or dangerous--but quirky, off-beat, campy, kitschy, Margaritavilley. respectable only in its proper fraternity or day of the week.
Many mainland school dress codes, apparently, deal with the possibility of Aloha shirts being worn on days that have been officially designated as “Hawaiian.” Pennington Academy, a New Jersey private school, strictly bans Aloha shirts from its campus and at Milton Christian Academy, where the dress code explicitly targets clothes showing a student’s body by “tightness or shortness,” the Aloha shirt is definitely out as sure as “cult, satanic or gang related” apparel--even though Hawaiian shirts have never been accused of tightly showing off the body. The Aloha shirt is associated with a kind of outrageous body acceptance and denial--not caring what people think and caring deeply about aesthetic statement. In an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is worried a Hawaiian-shirt wearing Bart is gay, Homer says, “only two kinds of people wear Hawaiian shirts, gay guys and big fat party animals--and Bart doesn’t look like a big fat party animal.”
Whatever the cultural space afforded the Aloha shirt--bright and as elaborate as an antique Japanese print and as common as a terri-cloth halter top in Wal-Mart--the Hawaiianess of the Aloha shirt is always its context, the concept or idealization of a version of Hawaii always the implication behind its durability.
The Aloha shirt is not Hawaiian. Hawaiian dress is a matter of a more typically historicized problem with body acceptance. The first wave of missionaries to the islands were appalled by the "heathen nakedness" of native Hawaiians. The first examples of western clothes the native Hawaiians would have worn were all modest and conservative English clothes. Though some have suggested the signature gesture of the Aloha shirt is anticipated by a native custom of taking drab garments supplied by missionaries and adding colorful motifs to them (The mu’muu as a bright version of the Mother Hubbard dress) the Aloha shirt was not invented in the fields of the plantations.
In the 19th century, as cheap English cotton drygoods began making their way to the South Pacific, Tahitians began wearing the pareo, a large rectangle of bright cloth with large white floral emblems. Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings often feature locals wearing these pareos. Gauguin himself eagerly took to wearing the cloth and wrote in his Tahitian Journal (Noa Noa), “A princess entered my chamber where I lay, half-ill, on the bed, dressed only in a pareo--what an outfit to address a woman of rank.”
Also, before the colorful Aloha shirts would be associated with the Hawaiian islands, a woven cotton plaid material favored by paniolo cowboys called palaka was the original Hawaiian shirt. This simple check plaid (usually white and blue) was favored by farmers, plantation workers, and would ironically become the basis of many Hawaiian school uniforms. The palaka is still sometimes called the “real Hawaiian shirt” and, as far as dress becomes a specific act of representation, is favored by those who want to stress authentic Hawaiianess as opposed to a more touristy Hawaiianess. The more restrained Aloha shirts of service workers in Hawaii, from hotel clerks to waiters, often forgo the silky texture and colorful design of the Aloha shirt in favor of a sturdier cotton blue and white design which mixes palaka with pareo.
What would eventually be known as the Aloha shirt was born in Chinese and Japanese tailor shops in downtown Honolulu in the late 20s / early 30s. While the claims of invention and ownership are too varied for me to value one over the other, it is clear that skilled sewers in Honolulu working with imported Japanese silks began making stylish short and long sleeved print shirts which were popular with University students and with tourists. Mainlanders too began seeing these unique bits of apparel and began bringing them home.
In the 1930s, American popular culture began recognizing Hawaii in a more significant way. Bing Crosby’s movie Waikiki Wedding was the biggest hit of 1936 and Crosby won an academy award for his rendition of “Sweet Leilani.” Crosby helped popularize Hawaiian songs like “Blue Hawaii” (which Elvis would re-energize in the 1960s) and furthermore helped popularize the notion of Hawaiian style as essentially laid-back and relaxed. Don Ho, who would become Hawaii’s most well-known singer, essentially worked the same angle as Bing. Hawaii's still vibrant and indigenous music scene remains dedicated to its sense of the unstressed life--unsurprisingly adopting some of the musical notes of reggae and creating a unique hybrid known as "Jawaiian." Hawaii was not meant to be a place of suits and collars but a beach cocktail party: the aloha shirt serves an immediate function of the need for Hawaii itself to provide the allure of exotic allowance neatly with the functionalist comforts of America. California--but with ukulele songs.
The so-called golden age of Aloha Shirts comes along with flight tourism and the increased search for the cinematic Hawaii. In Honolulu, shirtmakers such as King-Smith Clothiers, Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker, and Musa-Shiya Shoten all created what are now among the most valued examples of vintage shirts. In design, they are not remarkably different than the ones that currently are stacked up in every Waikiki gift shop.
The early shirtmakers strategically recognized the potential in their product and quickly adjoined it to clever advertising schemes and began attracting the interest of Mainland “sportswear” manafacturers. The war quickly ended any idea that Hawaii would become the textile giant of the Pacific but after the war, as polyester materials began to be used more widely in the textile industry, Aloha shirts began to appear more regularly stateside and, despite their “exotic” announcements, became as common as sneakers or baseball hats.
After Hawaii became a state in 1949, and Thor Heyderdahl completed his polynesian Kon Tiki expedition, more affected Hawaiian-Polynesian styles became a popular fad in the U.S. Backyard luaus complete with Aloha shirts and leis were commonplace a new generation of American drinkers who dutifully learned all about cocktails with names like Fog Cutter, Suffering Bastard and Missionary’s Downfall. Musicians like Martin Denny, Les Baxter and Arthur Lyman were creating hit records providing a jazzy ambiant South Seas sound that would eventually be known as “Exotica.” Moreover, Chinese restaurants all over America were presenting themselves in decor and spirit as sophisticated polynesian "tiki clubs." Thus, Aloha shirts, exotic rum drinks, and polynesian decor would eventually become the staples of what would eventually be known as "Tiki Culture."
In a way, the Aloha shirt has had nowhere to go since the 50s: it has been an easily available item of American sportswear ever since. However, the pastoral configurations of Hawaii in the form of outrageous Tiki bars and backyard luaus have long since faded in popularity. It’s been awhile since a celebrity has put out an album of Hawaiian standards--a de rigeur gesture of the Hawaii-happy 50s that saw Island efforts from Dean Martin, Burl Ives, Steve Lawrence, and Tennessee Ernie Ford.
The movement of contemporary Tiki Culture, exemplified by magazines like Tiki News, is an attempt to reconnect with the mainland’s 1950s version of Hawaii. An ironic, nostalgic recapitulation of an already ironic, nostalgic Hawaii. What seems to be celebrated is an innocence of taste, where the simulation of the exotic is preferable to the exotic because it’s transportable and commercially reproduceable. Much like a casual Friday, all the Hawaii of the bungalow basement requires is a wacky shirt and a bottle of rum. The tiki aficionado therefore appreciates the fakeness of Hawaii. There is no such thing as a tiki bar in Hawaii: “tiki” exists only as a simulacrum--more authentic in Upstate New York than it is in Tahiti. If a true tiki aficionado found themselves in Honolulu, they would go to Nashville Waikiki, a so-called “authentic country bar,” finding its simulacra of roadhouse America much more appealing than the real palm trees, the real beaches and so on.
Aloha shirts likewise have more to do with the enlistment of Hawaii to enable one's party mode as one gets older. If not ethnically Hawaiian, the Aloha shirt’s factual genesis is a perfect example of the plural Hawaii.
In movies and TV, Hawaiian authenticity has often been maintained by location shooting. While there are many shows set in New York but filmed in Los Angeles, none that I know of would set a show in Hawaii without aiming for the scenery. Hawaii Five-O aired from September 1968 to April 1980, more recently supplanted by NYPD Blue as the longest continuous-running police series in U.S. television history and filmed entirely on location around Honolulu. Jack Lord played the savvy, helmet-haired, tough cop Steve McGarrett. It was a pretty straight cop series with very little backstory inserted into the plots. In its lingo and storylines, the anxieties of the time are often drawn through the plots: the generation gap, cold war, drug use and Vietnam. Jack Lord’s Steve McGarrett (one of the Steves in the Tao of Steve) had a unique swagger which remains the series’ signature. His catchphrase “Book ‘em Dan-o” is one of TV’s most durable catchphrases. McGarrett had a way of showing imperious contempt for the freaks and weirdos of the seventies that isolated him as a force to be reckoned with. As one commentator put it “no one could sneer groovy or hip like McGarrett, not even Spiro Agnew.”
In an episode from their third season called “Trouble in Mind” Nancy Wilson plays a heroin addicted singer looking for a fix. Tension builds as it’s known there's a batch of arsenic-laced heroin on the island, killing several junkies along the way. As with all episodes where McGarrett shows off his knowledge of drug slang, it’s a classic Five-O, where the composer of the main theme, Morton Stevens plays a drummer who dies from using the bad dope in the opening scene. There’s also a very disturbing scene with a young kid, no more than 10, who claims to be a heroin addict. When the kid is berated for his habit, the kid says "that’s just fuzz jive."
Unlike Thomas Magnum of Magnum PI who fully endorsed the casual code of Hawaiiness with his khaki shorts, ballcap and red aloha shirt, Steve McGarrett was rarely seen outside of one of his tailor made dark suits in the length of the whole series. His fashion sense, rather than being strictly by the book is actually quite dandy: esp. with his coiffed hair and seemingly-touched eyelashes. McGarrett’s suits are not the suits of a High School principal but the secure gesture of a feminine understanding exemplified by James Bond but seen in other macho dandies like Puff Daddy or Don Cherry. In the final season of Five-O, McGarrett once went with a full pink suit--a choice which continues to bring consternation to the show’s fans who see in McGarrett an ideal of masculine stoicism in the face of a changing world and demands to “lighten up.”
On the occasions where McGarrett is forced undercover and must mingle with island fun-lovers, he will concede and wear an aloha shirt, but a full-sleeved one--which he will usually accessorize with a nice white ascot--And one must applaud anyone for hanging tight with the ascot. It's a weird look. Seeing McGarrett trying to look casual is discomforting, like seeing a senator in flip flops. The reason why the dress code on Hawaiian shirt days at the office becomes mandatory is because no one wants to be the only one who took the request seriously.
What may be interpreted as an imperial interest on McGarrett’s part, a refusal to concede to island custom or authority (McGarrett is never one for the superstitions of old Island customs), may better be seen as some actual conservative modesty. A belief in covering the body. I can’t verify the rumors that Jack Lords’ arms were covered by naval tattoos which made it impossible for him to wear short sleeves on prime time TV, but Lord’s gentle modesty is easy to pick up on. Rather than being a heartless enforcer, Lords was a gentleman who, in his spare time, painted and talked about the singular virtue of love. But the Hawaii of the Five-O office was not where Bing Crosby crooned--it's a place of drug dealers, serial killers and political assassinations. Steve McGarrett does not drink, does not hang on on the beach and for those who work with him there are no casual days.
posted by Five-Oios at 2:10 PM
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