LOGAN — There's more to those bright, tropical shirts from Hawaii than meets the eye, says Utah State University department of English graduate student Tim Trask. He has made the shirts a subject of research and in the process has added more than 22 of them to his own wardrobe, some of them handcrafted in the islands.
Trask became interested when he purchased an "Aloha shirt" from a Logan department store in the fall of 2001.
"It was made in Korea, but the pattern and cut identified it as a Hawaiian shirt," said Trask. The folklore thesis he wrote for a master's degree spurred his interest in such things and he began to look into the origins and ongoing attraction of the shirts.
"Most forms of expressive culture are created by a group for that group," said Trask. "But the Aloha shirt was created by the islanders expressly for the tourists, which is unique because one group is manufacturing an identity for another. And the shirt, which is now widely manufactured and available, initially was a status symbol worn only by the rich and famous."
Tracing the history of the shirt has been fascinating, said Trask. "They started as kids' shirts made of scraps of material left over from the making of kimonos, which were popular local attire in Hawaii in the 1920s."
Tourists identified the brightly colored children's garments as emblematic of the culture, and a market was born.
In the 1930s and '40s the islands were a party destination for Hollywood celebrities, and publicity photos of stars in Hawaiian shirts were common.
"The shirts were coveted and rare, because they could only be obtained at great expense by traveling to the islands," said Trask. World War II and the influx of American military personnel to Hawaii changed that. " The tourist base shifted, and the shirt no longer was an elitist symbol," he said.
At first, Trask said, the shirts were hand-tailored, one at a time, and the buyer had to wait. Now they are mass-produced in places such as Korea and sold in dozens of U.S. outlets. But the pattern and the cut still identify them as Hawaiian, Trask said.
The message, whether worn as a status symbol by a star in the '30s or by a counterculture rebel in the '60s has remained the same: "Don't bother me, I'm on vacation!"