Hawaii in the late 1920s was becoming a destination. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel opened on Waikiki in 1927, Matson's liners were bringing visitors across from the mainland, and the islands were being sold to the world as paradise. At the same time, in the dry-goods shops of downtown Honolulu, something quieter was happening. Teenagers were buying bolts of finely printed kabe crepe imported from Japan and asking their mothers to sew them shirts.

Those shirts weren't a product yet. They were just what local boys wore. But the idea — loud printed cloth, cut into a loose short-sleeved shirt, worn untucked in the heat — spread from home sewers to the Asian dry-goods merchants, and from there to the tailors and dressmakers of Honolulu. By the middle of the 1930s it had a name and a shop window.

Ellery Chun and the shirt in the window

Ellery Chun was born in Honolulu in 1909 and ran King-Smith Clothiers, a dry-goods store in Waikiki. Working with his sister Ethel Chun Lum, who designed the prints, he had shirts run up from leftover kimono fabric — bright, floral, short-sleeved, unlike anything sold as menswear at the time.

Then he did the thing that made him the pioneer rather than just another tailor: he put one in the window with a sign that said Aloha Shirt. The phrase first appeared in print in a Honolulu Advertiser advertisement on June 28, 1935, and Chun registered the Aloha trade name on July 15, 1936.

They sold to everyone — residents, beach boys, surfers, and the visitors coming off the ships. Chun died on June 16, 2000, at 91, having watched a shirt he named become the most recognizable garment to come out of any American state.

What the early prints actually meant

The first aloha shirts didn't show palm trees and surfboards. Because the cloth came from Japan, the imagery did too, and it carried meaning that most buyers today have no idea they're wearing.

• Pine and plum — long life, good fortune, success.
• Tiger — strength and courage.
• Bamboo — strength together with flexibility.
• Mount Fuji, temples, quiet landscapes — the imagery of home, for a community far from it.

Then local artists started designing for local cloth. Elsie Das drew botanical prints of what actually grew here — hibiscus, breadfruit, night-blooming cereus — along with a pattern of hula girls that was frankly a joke and sold anyway. Ethel Chun Lum drew flying fish she'd watched from the deck of a Matson liner on her first crossing to the mainland.

That's the turn that matters. The shirt stopped borrowing someone else's symbols and started depicting Hawaii. Manufacturers like Kamehameha and Branfleet — later known as Kahala — had been printing Asian motifs in small factories since the mid-1930s. Now they commissioned island artists, and the shirts filled up with coconut palms, outrigger canoes, surfers, tropical fish and flowers. Wearable postcards.

A timeline

• 1920s

  Kabe crepe from JapanHonolulu teenagers buy imported printed cloth in downtown dry-goods shops and have shirts sewn at home.

• 1927

  The Royal Hawaiian opensMatson liners bring visitors to Waikiki, and Hawaii becomes a destination with a look to sell.

• 1935

  The phrase appears in print"Aloha shirt" runs in a Honolulu Advertiser advertisement on June 28.

• 1936

  Ellery Chun registers "Aloha"July 15. King-Smith Clothiers begins marketing Hawaiian-print shirts in earnest.

• 1930s–50s

  The Golden AgeKamehameha, Kahala, Musa-Shiya, Watumull's, Surfriders, Alfred Shaheen and Duke Kahanamoku put out the shirts collectors hunt today.

• 1951

  Truman on the cover of LifeThe 33rd President, a genuine enthusiast, in an aloha shirt on a national magazine cover.

• 1953

  From Here to EternityMontgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra wear them on screen, and the mainland sees the shirt as shorthand for the islands.

• 1980s

  Magnum P.I.Tom Selleck reintroduces the aloha shirt to a television audience of millions.

• 2011

  Year of the Aloha ShirtGovernor Neil Abercrombie proclaims it on May 4, formally recognizing the shirt as a cultural icon of Hawaii.

The names on the old labels

Turn a vintage shirt inside out and you'll find one of these. Collectors buy the label as much as the print.

Who put it on

Duke Kahanamoku was the first and greatest promoter it ever had. Olympic swimming champion, the man who carried surfing to the world, and Hawaii's most beloved figure — he wore the shirts and eventually had his own line, now among the most collected of all.

After him, most of mid-century American celebrity. Harry Truman loved them and made the cover of Life in one in 1951. Bing Crosby wore his under a porkpie hat with a pipe. Arthur Godfrey played ukulele in one on the radio. Johnny Weissmuller, John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra. Then Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I., who did for the shirt in the 1980s what Duke had done in the 1930s.

Why it lasted

Plenty of regional garments exist. Almost none of them travel. The aloha shirt did, and the reason isn't the print — it's the word. Aloha carries greeting, affection, and farewell in one breath, and a shirt that wears that word is making a small statement about a place and one's connection to it. Like a lei, it's given and worn as a gesture.

That's why it survived the tourist-souvenir phase, the polyester decades, and every prediction of its death. It isn't a novelty. It's the most portable piece of Hawaii there is.

Common Questions

Last updated August 2026