aloha shirt - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

aloha shirts

Former trademark, coined by Ellery Chun.[1]

aloha shirt (plural aloha shirts)

  1. A collared shirt of a type originating in Hawaii, often brilliantly colored with floral or Polynesian patterns. [from 1930s][2][3]
    Synonym: Hawaiian shirt

    • 1935, Travel‎[2], volumes 76-77:
      At this election booth one of the officials wears the popular, brightly colored "aloha" shirt; the other a feather lei about his hat.
    • 1996 September, Patrick Mott, “100% Cotton Prozac”, in Orange Coast, volume 22, number 9, →ISSN, page 28:
      No Savile Row suit, no pure silk business ensemble, no costume of any sort, modern or ancient, can possibly beat the traditional aloha shirt for pure form-follows-function glory. Put on a real aloha shirt, with primary colors detonating all over the surface, and you couldn't hang on to a bummer of a mood if your sister was dating Saddam Hussein.
    • 1999 December 14, Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor, New York: The Free Press, →ISBN, page 83:
      Emanuel was proud of his image reflected in the glass—tropical blooms covered every inch of his short-sleeved aloha shirt in a busy design of Hawaiian hibiscus, poinsettia, and bougainvillea.
    • 2006 Spring, Linda B. Arthur, “The Aloha Shirt and Ethnicity in Hawai'i”, in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, volume 4, number 1, Berg Publishers, →DOI, pages 8–34:
      The design motifs on the early 1930s aloha shirts were generally Japanese or Chinese and applied to the greige goods by roller printing in Japan.

  2. ^ “Ellery Chun, 91, Popularizer Of the Shirt That Won Hawaii”, in New York Times‎[1], 2000 June 8: “He turned a Chinese dry goods shop, King-Smith Clothiers at 36 North King Street, into the first mass producer of Hawaiian shirts. Most important, he gave them the name by which they are called on the Hawaiian Islands, aloha shirts.”

  3. ^ Reinecke, John E. with Tsuzaki, Stanley M. (1967 Winter) “Hawaiian Loanwords in Hawaiian English of the 1930's”, in Oceanic Linguistics, volume 6, number 2, →ISSN, →JSTOR, pages 80-115

  4. ^ Morgado, Marcia A. (2003 March) “From Kitsch to Chic: The Transformation of Hawaiian Shirt Aesthetics”, in Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, volume 21, number 2, →DOI, →ISSN, pages 75-88: “In Hawai'i, the garment is always referred to as an aloha shirt, often spelled with a capital A. The practice may reflect an earlier time when the phrase “Aloha shirt” was protected under copyright. Outside the Islands the garment is commonly know as the Hawaiian shirt.”