Untucked

1957--An American stands beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wears Bermuda shorts, dress socks, dress shoes, sunglasses and a blazingly colorful Hawaiian shirt. Analysis: French word for “dweeb.”

1997--An American stands beneath the Century City office towers in Los Angeles. He wears khaki slacks, dress socks, dress shoes, sunglasses and a blazingly colorful Hawaiian shirt. Analysis: fashion pacesetter.

Amazing what four decades and a little archival clothing scholarship will do.

Once considered almost freakishly loud in the world outside Hawaii, the Hawaiian shirt is enjoying a mainland boom as manufacturers resurrect the best of the classic designs from the 1930s and ‘40s. And while the newly minted versions may be in demand, the originals are fetching four-figure prices from collectors.

“They kind of make people think of a better place and a better time,” said Bart Silberman, national sales manager for Reyn Spooner, a Hawaii-based shirt manufacturer. “And with men’s clothing becoming more casual--with Friday casual days and all that--if you can get a more sophisticated retro aloha shirt and wear it with chinos or gabardine slacks, you’re considered dressy and sophisticated, not a dumb tourist. You can really set yourself apart from someone wearing a plaid or striped shirt and still be acceptable.”

Notice that he said “aloha” shirt. That’s what inhabitants of the floral print jungle have been calling Hawaiian shirts since Ellery Chun, a Hawaiian designer who was the first to make the shirts commercially, began using the word in the 1930s.

The forerunner of the modern aloha shirt was probably the durable but bland “thousand mile shirt” worn by settlers during the great western migration of the last century. Missionaries and early settlers brought the shirt with them to Hawaii. When they insisted that the native islanders be clothed, the islanders took to wearing the shirts but soon decorated them with traditional tapa cloth motifs.

In the late 1920s, when cruise ships began to arrive more frequently from the mainland, carrying souvenir-happy vacationers, small shops began producing custom-tailored versions of what was to become the modern aloha shirt.

The first true aloha shirts were made of cotton or silk, but the dye patterns did not hold well on either fabric. When rayon became available in the mid-1920s, it proved to be the perfect fabric--soft, durable, inexpensive and colorfast.

Hollywood loved them. Aloha shirts ended up on the backs of Bing Crosby, Montgomery Clift, Arthur Godfrey, Tony Curtis, Anne Sheridan, Frank Sinatra, Elvis and even the always natty President Truman, who appeared on the cover of Life magazine wearing one.

These classic shirts of the ‘30s and ‘40s--some of the most popular of which were produced by the Hawaiian Olympian and surfing pioneer Duke Kahanamoku--are inspiring the current revival.

There’s even a book dedicated to the subject: “The Hawaiian Shirt: Its Art and History” by H. Thomas Steele (Abbeville Press, 1984). Manufacturers and retailers think of it as their sartorial bible, and it doesn’t hurt that the author is the stepson of actor Gavin MacLeod--the tropically tailored skipper of television’s “Love Boat.”

Dick Braeger, owner of the Gary’s Island stores in Southern California (Santa Barbara, Newport Beach, Palm Desert, Del Mar and more), which stock hundreds of styles of aloha shirts, said, “Everybody loves the old retro designs. Every time we remake one of them we sell out of them. They’re some of the best successes we’ve ever had.”

Certain designs are perennial favorites, Braeger said. One, called “The Land of Aloha,” features scenes of hula girls, palm trees, fish and ukuleles--a very busy shirt. Another classic has vertical floral prints. And there’s always the Matson line shirt.

“In the ‘30s and ‘40s, the Matson steamship line went to Hawaii and everybody was very dressy, black tie and all that, and it was very luxurious. The Matson line would get artists to do a design for their menu covers every season and those cover designs were used in a shirt. The shirt was named ‘Lurline’ after the ship.”

Not every shirt that looks Hawaiian is an aloha shirt, however. Silberman said the brightly patterned shirts on the market that feature such items as beer bottles, cigars and college logos are close, but. . . .

“The true aloha shirt,” he said, “has flowers, surfers, hula girls, pineapples, fish or other things like that, or any combination of them.”

Most new quality aloha shirts, whether the design is new or resurrected, can be had for $50 to $90. If the shirt is an original and features a classic design, the price can be far greater. And it gets bigger the farther west one goes.

You could buy an original shirt from, say, Aardvark’s, a vintage clothing company in Los Angeles that deals in classic aloha shirts, for $500. That same shirt at Bailey’s in Honolulu, the country’s largest dealer in older aloha shirts, would probably cost $2,500, Silberman said. In Japan, where the aloha shirt is considered a highly desirable bit of Americana, the tag might read $5,000, he said.

This, Silberman said, does not necessarily deter collectors. He has “about 750 shirts--from fairly worthless stuff to some worth about $2,500.”

Outside Japan, he said, most serious collectors live on the West Coast or in New York, and they buy the old shirts to preserve and display, not to wear. Actually, they probably wouldn’t fit anyway: Silberman said it’s almost impossible to find a vintage aloha shirt in any size other than small or medium.

“People were just smaller back then,” he said.

Many collectibles wind up in the archives of the shirt manufacturers, who retrieve them at intervals to copy the designs and reissue them. Reyn Spooner, said Silberman, has been doing this at an accelerated pace to keep up with demand. The result was the most profitable year in the company’s history in 1996, he said.

The enduring appeal of the aloha shirt, however, comes down to one simple ingredient, said Braeger: fun.

“That’s the main reason I got into this, to have fun,” he said. “People just have a good time when they wear them. And there’s the nostalgia. This is really something that was invented in America. It didn’t start in Europe or some other place. It’s true Americana.”

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The Shirts of Paradise

There are three distinct types of classic aloha shirts, according to H. Thomas Steele, author of “The Hawaiian Shirt: It’s Art and History”:

* Patterned shirts. Featuring hibiscus, ukuleles, leis, birds of paradise, bunches of bananas, grass huts, tropical fish and other items particular to the islands, the prints resemble bright wallpaper.

* Border shirts. Cut longer than other models, these vertical designs ideally match along the front plackets, the pockets, the side seams and even the collar. Warning: “It is a sacrilege to tuck in a border shirt,” Steele exclaims.

* Picture shirts. Adapted via photo-silkscreening from photographs, they might depict scenes of Diamond Head, the Aloha Tower, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and other island landmarks. “The tourists could wear their photo albums home,” Steele says.

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Shirts courtesy of Gary’s Island archives.