Bye, Drab Uniforms; Aloha, Colorful Prints

The young people are wearing aloha shirts, and the feel is of summer vacation. Beth Powell is jogging. Tom Badum and Erik Bonn toss a football. Megan Stevenson chats with friends and looks out at the surf pounding the beach.

An afternoon at a Maui resort? Try morning recess at Newport Elementary School, right on the beach in Orange County. The Hawaiian-themed clothing is not an extravagance but part of the school uniform.

“It’s pretty nice to have to wear something like this to school,” Megan, 10, said of her red-and-white, hibiscus-patterned outfit. “Not many schools have this. It’s cool.”

Across the region a few campuses have performed a fashion fusion, merging the school uniform--that quasi-military method of keeping order--with beachwear--that sartorial symbol of fun.

Is there any tool of conformity that Californians won’t turn into an emblem of self-expression?

Newport Elementary is one of five Orange County schools--four public, one private--to adopt aloha prints as their uniform in the last two years. Schools in Long Beach, on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and in the San Fernando Valley are considering similar changes. And a local manufacturer of beachwear has received serious inquiries from schools in Colorado, Florida and Rhode Island.

“I feel like this will be the trend going forward,” said Sissi Cruse, a parent at Mariners Christian School in Costa Mesa, which added Hawaiian prints to the dress code in the fall. “It can be cute and fun for the kids--[it] really allows them to make a statement while giving you the advantages of uniform dress.”

The Hawaiian shirt’s new role as school uniform represents a strange turn for a phenomenon long associated with variety and vacation. The first aloha shirts were created by Honolulu tailors in the 1930s using traditional Japanese fabrics. Even President Truman bought into the craze, wearing one on the cover of Life magazine half a century ago.

“There’s a certain irony in Hawaiian prints as school uniforms,” said Josh Feldman, vice president of the Hawaiian sportswear maker Tori Richard Ltd., which has seen steadily rising requests for Hawaiian patterns from school choirs and sports teams. “But fashion is cyclical.”

In the last three years, Hawaiian shirts have had their moment on the Paris runways, with aloha patterns being used on Tommy Hilfiger pants and Gucci handbags. With the surge in sales, manufacturers small and large have saturated the market. To find new customers for their bulging inventories, clothiers have looked to other segments of the garment industry.

The renewed popularity of Hawaiian shirts and the manufacturers’ eagerness to find new markets intersected fortuitously in the summer of 1999 in Newport Beach.

At Newport Elementary, a campus of 500 students in kindergarten through sixth grade, a committee of parents and teachers was meeting to consider a uniform. Principal Denise Knutsen suggested that Hawaiian shirts were in fashion and might be fitting for an oceanfront school.

The committee organized a fashion show for parents, with students dressed in prospective patterns. Then they held a vote among parents. The Newport Mesa Unified School District required that a school receive 70% support to adopt a uniform policy. The Hawaiian shirts won 72% of the vote.

“We didn’t really push people to vote for or against,” said Virginia Osadche, a parent and former defense company administrator who helped lead the effort. “But the idea of a Hawaiian theme convinced people, even some of those who worried that their children would lose individuality.”

Osadche selected Metropolitan Prairie, a mom-and-pop Orange County firm, to manufacture the shirts. Its owner, Tim Bernardy, was intrigued by the idea.

“Clothing is a mature business, and you don’t see new markets open up every day,” said Bernardy, who has spent recent weeks meeting with school districts and attending conferences of teachers and Christian schools. “This could be just a nice niche market in the end, or it could be something bigger.”

After months of talking, Newport Elementary selected a traditional hibiscus print, in navy blue and white. This year, the school added red-and-white shirts. Because it is a public school, the uniform had to be voluntary. (Parents who want to opt out of the dress code must sign waivers.) Still, when the uniform was launched in the fall of 2000, 800 of the shirts were sold.

“It created excitement at first,” Knutsen said. Soon, she found that--as at thousands of other schools that have adopted more conventional uniforms--attendance shot up and incidents of trouble on the schoolyard declined. “It brings a relaxed kind of order. People put on the shirt and get in the school mode. It doesn’t matter so much exactly what the shirt is.”

The move created a minor sensation in Orange County. Teachers and custodians snapped up adult-sized versions of the uniforms. A local businessman, insisting on anonymity, bought shirts for every student who couldn’t afford them. Inquiries from other schools came in.

Parents at nearby East Bluff Elementary, which reopened in 1999 after 15 years of closure, added a Hawaiian shirt option to a traditional uniform of navy blue or white tops and khaki bottoms. Students began wearing blue or red Hawaiian shirts, with hibiscus prints in white, last fall.

“After Sept. 11, it has turned out to be a really patriotic statement, with the red, white and blue colors,” said Shelley Sweeney, the mother of a first-grader.

Three other schools adopted the Hawaiian print uniforms this fall. Among them was Mariners Christian, a private campus of 660 students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. “We’re pretty traditional. We still have spelling books,” Headmaster Mary Letterman said.

Before the current school year, the school had a broadly worded dress code, but parents and board members believed that some students were not dressing modestly enough.

Teachers say they spent considerable time warning girls not to expose their midriffs and boys to tuck in their shirts; something more “uniform” was needed. The school made contact with Bernardy, and by the fall Hawaiian shirts were part of the uniform.

The shirts have proved particularly popular with elementary-age students. Mariners fifth-grader Stephanie Head says she has saved 20 minutes in the morning because she doesn’t have to think about what she wears.

Classmate Grant Templeton says the Hawaiian shirt “is nice because you’re not supposed to tuck it in.”

“With the new uniforms, I have noticed a calmness in class,” said Nancy Wilder, who teaches English and the Bible at Mariners.

The only pockets of resistance are among older students. Katie Schulte, the student body president, says eighth-graders successfully argued to be exempted from the uniform. Few of the middle schoolers don the shirts.

“I’m not sure how cool the Hawaiian shirts are anymore,” said Eric Chan, a seventh-grader. “Once it’s a uniform, is it still cool?”