The Hawaiian shirt (sometimes known as the Aloha shirt), is a style of colourful dress shirt that originated (unsurprisingly) in Hawaii.
According to some sources, the shirts can be traced back to the late 1920s and early 1930s when the Honolulu-based dry goods store “Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker” started making shirts from colourful Japanese prints. Within years, major designer labels sprang up all over Hawaii and began manufacturing and selling the shirts en masse.
After World War II, many servicemen and servicewomen returned to the United States from Asia and the Pacific islands with Hawaiian shirts.
Elvis Presley pushed it into the mainstream consciousness when he donned a red floral version, complete with a lei and a ukulele in the 1961 film Blue Hawaii.
The shirt soon became synonymous with cheesy tourists or unfashionable dads – or both.
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