High, Wide and Hawaiian

By JAY COCKS

How about a nice round of applause for Ellery J. Chun? Chun is credited not only with first using the term "aloha shirt" but with being the first to manufacture commercially those eye-glazing prints.

That was back in 1936, when the shirts sold for about a buck. Now the same % number might go for several hundred times the original price. Now high-fashion designers from Italy, Japan and France are adapting and transmuting the fit, dash and splashy spirit of Hawaiian shirts into a bedazzling array of prints. Now up-to-the-minute fashion emporiums like Barneys in New York City import racks full of new Hawaiians, while Bill Gold, co-owner of a vintage clothing store called Repeat Performance in Los Angeles, will go on buying trips to the Midwest to ferret out some good old numbers that have long been packed away -- perhaps in embarrassment. Now, in the islands, says Dave Rockland of Surf Line Hawaii, "we're fighting to make deliveries. It's the Cabbage Patch doll phenomenon."

Ellery J. Chun: visionary.

Like most fashion trends, however, the hoopla over Hawaiians has been around for some time. Designer fashion has been turning away from somber print hues and subdued patterns over the past few seasons, and the shirts, whether worn by men or women, have an insouciance that works as a parody of conventional cool. "They're great fun to wear," says Tom Selleck, television's most agreeable private eye, who often sports custom-made Hawaiian shirts while crime busting in the islands. "And they're murder under a navy linen sports coat." Says Harriet Love, who carries a good supply of prime old Hawaiians at her store in Manhattan's SoHo district, "Grown men are following their antiheroes. Selleck is the '80s adventurer, in a way. He's casual, nice to women, and he wears Hawaiian shirts."

Onetime tourist regalia, a fanciful means of selling what Writer DeSoto Brown calls "the paradise business," Hawaiian shirts flared into full fashion in the 1950s: President Harry Truman, grinning broadly, appeared on the cover of LIFE wearing a typical eye-popper in 1951. Not long after, the vibrancy of the colors and liveliness of the prints became synonymous with yokeldom and ugly Americanism, what every cartoon American tourist would wear under his camera straps and over his walking shorts, sandals and nylon ankle socks.

Rock musicians revived the shirts again in the '70s, partly because the island of Maui became a heavy hangout and partly out of the counterculture reflex to challenge prevailing standards of taste. Today there is a hard core of fanatics who collect the shirts as if they were first editions and value them as what Eliot Hubbard, Publicity Director of CBS's Epic Records, calls "high art." Hubbard's shirt stash which, at 300 and counting, he claims is "the third biggest in the world," goes heavy on popular florals. "My tastes," he says, "run to big botanicals and big biologicals."

Like most Hawaiian collectors, Hubbard can scrutinize a label as if it were the vintage on a wine bottle, but his low regard for the new shirts is not just the snobbery that comes from expertise. The old classics have a vibrancy and subtlety of hue that the newer manufacturers cannot duplicate, and a shimmering lightness on the body that no amount of contemporary technological wizardry can match. Some of the old Hawaiians were made of silk, but many of the most beautiful were made from rayon, which held a wide range of color dyes exceptionally well and seemed to have a natural coolness stashed somewhere between its man-made fibers. Fabric of that particular quality is no longer made, another reason that the old rayon has become especially prized: it is better, it is beautiful, and it cannot be had anymore.

Much the same can be said of the old shirts themselves -- they are very much like off-the-rack folk art -- but designers keep looking for a new hook. Jon Weiser, owner of Manhattan's haute-trendy Charivari chain, has been doing a giant business in new prints (romantic florals to abstract) worked up by the likes of Claude Montana and Yohji Yamamoto, and reports the rumor of a new development. "I hear," he says, "there is one designer making Hawaiian shirts padded with down for outerwear." If that idea takes off, L.L. Bean may have to open an outlet in Honolulu.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/New York and Richard Woodbury/ Los Angeles