My name is @acupofsarahki and I’m a fashion historian with a focus on Hawaiʻi. While my academic research focuses on nineteenth-century fashion economics, I am also interested in the twentieth-century history of the aloha shirt and aloha clothing broadly. I have been collecting vintage aloha clothing and textiles for the past ten years.
I have a particular affinity for men’s aloha shirts and t-shirts. When my grandpa passed, I took a stack of his shirts because he loved their kitschy phrases. My dad is a Reyn Spooner guy and their pullover style, half-button, slim-fit cut has been his uniform for the past 30 years. I was my husband’s vintage aloha shirt dealer for a time before we started dating too. In all three cases, all guys had more preferences about the fit, color, and design of their shirts than most people realized, which made certain shirts their staples. Men have historically had their own opinions about fashion, but we tend to overlook their decision making around clothing.
I have four main goals with this project.
1. To catalogue, historicize, and track aloha clothing that has come into my possession. I enjoy gifting and occasionally selling vintage clothing that I’ve collected so capturing them while they’re with me would be a nice thing to start doing. People shop for vintage for different reasons, but I tend to buy shirts for their historical qualities. I’ll try to explain why I thought it was worth collecting and what makes it interesting. Was it the design? Was it the material? The cut?
2. To showcase the diversity of designs and textiles that were designed and sold by Oceania-based aloha clothing companies. Companies based in Hawaiʻi account for the majority of brands I’ve collected but aloha clothing was also a phenomenon in the islands south of Hawaiʻi, and later along the Pacific Rim.
3. To talk with people about their love of aloha clothing. I’m interested in who makers imagine they design for, their design process, and struggles and successes in clothing manufacturing. For collectors and proud wearers of aloha clothing, I want to know what their favorites are and how they continue the aloha clothing tradition in the contemporary.
4. To reach a different audience with my research and learn new skills along the way. The biggest struggle for historians is finding relevance outside the academy. We have a thriving aloha clothing culture and here, I want to connect the trends we love now with the past (and with primary source references).
In NO WAY am I the authority on aloha shirt or aloha clothing. There are people who have published books on this same topic (see Hope, Dale. “Patagonia The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Hawaiian Islands.” (2016). I want this to be a forum where people can also discuss, correct me, and bring in other sources of knowledge about the things I feature. I hope to post here and on Instagram as frequently as I can, but please bear with me. I’m a Taurus who hasn’t used Illustrator in seven years. I want things to look nice and be well researched.
