The Aloha Shirt: The New Cool

Hawaiian gifts

This ain't your dad's Hawaiian shirt. Gone are the days of those old fuddy-duddy aloha shirts. Local Hawaiian fashion designers have made the aloha shirt look cool.

I’ve been living without aloha. Well, aloha shirts, at least.

Mens Hawaiian Shirts

Although I grew up in the Islands and consider myself at least kind of local, I currently own exactly two aloha shirts. And those only reached my closet as birthday gifts.

Aloha shirts just never seemed like me. Back in high school and my early 20s, when one’s personal style starts to gel, they were the kind of thing dads wore. They were big and floppy and said one of two things:

The bright, colorful ones with exuberant prints? Those were for older, Jimmy Buffett types—the kind of local guy who owned a boat and always kept the top three buttons undone, to let his chest hair ruffle in the breeze.

And then there were the aloha shirts with muted, reverse-print designs, worn by older businessmen. Tuck them into your slacks or keep the flat-cut bottoms loose—they still screamed boxy conservatism to me.

I opted instead for long-sleeved collared shirts, the kind you find at Banana Republic. You might say it was the kind of shirt my dad’s dad would have worn. Every generation’s youth might rebel against their parents’ style, but it all comes back around eventually, doesn’t it? The button-down long-sleeve became my personal uniform, never much variation on the prints, usually with the sleeves rolled up. My wardrobe didn’t quite reach the minimalism of Steve Jobs’ perpetual black turtleneck, but let’s just say I like the way he thought.

And so the years passed, with me not giving those old fuddy-duddy aloha shirts much more thought.

But while I stayed the same, aloha shirts, somewhere along the line, got cool. The revamp of the aloha shirt worked. Bam, suddenly it seemed like four out of five 20-somethings in Kaka‘ako and Chinatown were pairing their skinny jeans and obscure-label shades with aloha prints.


I’ve been watching this whole aloha revolution for a while now, bemused, feeling no need to jump on board. But then, this year, for my birthday, my sister Mary got me an aloha shirt. And while most gifts of clothing end up being ill-fitting or otherwise not quite right, this was nice and trim, with a subtle, dark aloha print. It felt surprisingly like me. When I wore it to the office for the first time, five different people commented favorably on my new look, and it’s since worked its way into my regular rotation of work clothes.

Guess it’s time to go shopping, and say aloha to a few new shirts. I'm going shopping online to Amazon for something authentic Hawaiian.

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