There is no better evidence for the Aloha shirt’s place in pop culture than just by looking at its history in TV and film: Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii Al Pacino in Scarface Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective Nick Cage in Raising Arizona Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High Jonah Hill in 22 Jump Street the list goes on and on but we think you get the picture with that brief sampling of the button up print shirt’s influence.įor decades the Aloha Shirt – or Hawaiian shirt as it is more commonly known – was seen as a fashion faux pas, a style sin only to be perpetrated by the tasteless or the stylistically illiterate. Fast forward to the 2020s and of course, the LGBT community has done our own take on it with wildly popular queer shirts being all the rage. However they came to be, Aloha shirts eventually made their way to mainland America in a big way and the rest, as they say, is history. Or perhaps it was the older generation of Japanese-Hawaiian women who started the trend by using kimono fabric to fashion shirts for the men-folk. The origin of the Aloha shirt is hotly contested to this day, though it seems that one small, local dry-goods store or another is responsible.
