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Fantasy comes to life with colorful shirts
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Published: July 14, 2008
Tomorrow morning I plan to wake up, get dressed and go out to meet the world doing my best to look like an American tourist.
What badge will identify me as intrinsically American: loud, garish and colorful? My Hawaiian shirt, of course. All I'll be missing is the modern equivalent of the Kodak Brownie around my neck.
If our clothes are indeed a primary means of expressing our identity, then Aloha to mine. I can't say exactly what appealed to me about the classic brightly colored, floral short-sleeved shirt when I bought my first one in the early 1970s.
Maybe it was the cool, literally and figuratively, feel of the rayon in the 1950s and '60s shirts, how light and airy they hung on the body. Or their emblematic designs, all built around the iconic palm tree and every imaginable version of canoes, thatched huts, scantily clad native women and tiki masks. Or the fact that they made you look like an American tourist, with or without the Brownie.
Whatever the lure, I was hooked. I think I have about two dozen Hawaiian shirts these days, picked up in a thrift shop here, a used clothing store there. They allow me to fantasize that I, too, could be a Hawaiian surf bum, even though the one time I tried to surf, in California, I came dangerously close to beheading myself with my board.
Wardrobe seemed like the safer option, so I took the deep dive into the island fantasy world of Aloha shirts, which have been around since the 1930s. Friends gave me books about Hawaiian shirts. I remember going to a restaurant in Santa Monica, right near the beach, to look at its Hawaiian shirt collection, which was framed throughout the eatery.
Shirts. In frames. I felt as if I were a piece of walking art.
Maybe that's why I am greeted occasionally with disapproving looks when I arrive at a board of directors meeting or a luncheon engagement wearing my summer threads. Let's just say I'm easy to identify, visually speaking.
Mostly my shirts seem to make people smile, and bring a little island cheer into their day. I'm very content with what comes out of my little section of Waikiki Beach, located in my North Carolina closet, minus the sand, the surf and the sun.
Lots of other people are dressing more casually, too, although not everyone's style is quite so Technicolor. The news was filled recently with stories of necktie manufacturers ready to hang themselves because of dropping sales -- even the business of business suits is taking a tumble. Things got so bad that the Winston-Salem city manager, Lee Garrity, had to issue a memo identifying just how casual is too casual.
I've never quite understood the American emphasis on business attire as instrumental to the success of business itself. It seems to me that if you do a good job at what you're being paid to do, and you're reasonably clean and well-groomed, it shouldn't really matter what you wear to work.
There's something called the fashion industry that has already won that argument, so I'll just continue my silent protest against The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit via the convenient and comfortable symbol of the Hawaiian shirt.
Just today I made a pass through the Goodwill store on Waughtown Street and happened upon a delightful polyester number. It is a magnificent fluorescent orange, with bright purple palm trees, and my guess is that it dates from the early 1970s.
I love it. No car will ever hit me at night when I'm wearing this shirt.
Unless I'm in Hawaii at sunset.
■ Dale Pollock, a former dean at the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, now teaches film there.
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