Hawaiian shirts are getting their moment in the sun

As top-name designers tinker with the Hawaiian shirt, is minimalism taking a holiday?

A few of the latest Hawaiian shirt prints from Tori Richard.

If menswear has a joker in the pack, it is perhaps the Hawaiian shirt. Loud, verging on raucous, it embodies everything that sophisticated men's dressing is meant to reject: bright colours, loose fits and wild patterns. And yet it is perhaps precisely because of the release it offers - aside from its happy practicality for any hot climate - that the style, properly called the aloha shirt, is having its moment in the sun.

Certainly brands the likes of Gant, Hartford, Levi's LVC and YMC are pushing the look. Tommy Bahama - its store is on the second floor of Dubai's Mall of the Emirates - now has various takes on accessible prints for its camp shirt line, and even designer labels such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Prada and Givenchy are among those who have made Hawaiian boldness the statement of their spring/summer collections. Might minimalistic chic not be the flavour of the season?

According to Josh Feldman, we're in the opposing cycle now, when the more ornamental is on the upswing. And he might know - Feldman is the boss at Tori Richard, the Hawaiian apparel brand and owners of Kahala, the pioneering aloha shirt brand established in 1936, just seven years after one Gordon Young prompted the earliest recorded reference to the style of shirt when he wore one to the University of Washington and nearly caused a riot. Feldman's father started Aloha Wednesday, when Hawaii's male populace donned what was the closest it had to a national dress - and what would spread to become the international phenomenon of casual Fridays.

"The aloha shirt appeals in two ways, aside from its being an answer to the ridiculous idea of wearing suits in environments with 100 per cent humidity," Feldman says. "For some it's novelty, a kind of costume. For others it reflects a type of aspiration to the Hawaiian lifestyle - the ideal it represents. The trick is to pick shirts that avoid the cliché - prints of palm trees and beer bottles, for example, which to an Hawaiian just singles you out as not actually being from here and might make you the butt of jokes - and to invest in designs that have artistic integrity. In fact, the best aloha shirts are art pieces put into textiles."

Indeed, Tori Richard - who received a wardrobe credit for the recently acclaimed George Clooney movie The Descendants, which has also given a boost to the style - designs some 500 original prints every year (complex prints, Feldman adds, also being favoured by the designer brands at the moment because they are so hard to copy). While digital printing is seeing good, affordable designs increasingly available, the connoisseur still favours the hand-engraved and printed cloths, and coconut buttons, used for the best shirts - a product of the textiles and tailoring know-how imported from nearby Japan and which helped establish apparel as Hawaii's number-two industry after agriculture.

Certainly, like rare denim, the aloha shirt has inspired serious collectors of the kind excited by the launch this season of Hope of Man, a release of 250 vintage shirts - most of them traditional in featuring Hawaiian flora and fauna, landscapes or hula dancing - compiled by Dale Hope, the one-time creative director of Kahala and whose parents founded Sun Fashions in Hawaii in 1953. Collectors are drawn to certain old brands - Haw Togs, Holo-Holo, Malihiwi, Kamehemeha among them - and treasure so-called "silkies", made from cool spun rayon or Dacron. Some change hands for US$5,000 (Dh18,000).

Indeed, whatever your class of shirt, Hope advises not wearing it like an American on holiday, with plaid trousers and black socks. Rather, channel the likes of Bing Crosby, Peter Lawford and Montgomery Clift for 1940s/1950s style inspiration, or even Al Jolson and Ronald Coleman - the movie stars of the 1930s who first made the aloha shirt symbolic of weekend rest and relaxation when snapped wearing them at their beachfront homes.

"There's a more subtle, understated approach to the prints that modern interpretations of the aloha shirt are bringing in - with floral and small, geometric patterns, for instance - that means it's not such a frightening thing to wear. That makes you realise that it's not a shirt you can only wear on holiday, too, but is a look that works just as well around town in summer," adds Ben Burkeman, an ex-designer for Gap turned founder of the US menswear brand Burkeman Brothers. Its new collection was inspired by a trip to Hawaii - or, more specifically, by a day spent in Honolulu's Bailey's, one of the state's leading dealers of original shirts, with more than 15,000 on offer. "That said, it's one of those garments you have to be sure you want to wear because it has to be worn with some confidence. There must be some deep appeal to it, though. It's going to be big this year - and even bigger next year."

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