SPEAKER_03: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Some companies are big, others are small. To Robert Half, their hiring needs are equally huge. At Robert Half, our specialized recruiting professionals elevate their expertise with proprietary A.I. tools to transform candidate discovery, assessment, and selection. Whether sourcing talent locally or in any geography that works for you, Robert Half can pinpoint hard to find candidates in finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, and administrative and customer support. At Robert Half, we know talent. Learn more at roberthalf.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I was actually like low-key pretty good at hula, not gonna lie.
SPEAKER_14: Sarah Burke grew up in Hawaii, just outside of Honolulu.
SPEAKER_13: When I was in high school, I visited New York for the first time and noticed that a lot of vintage shops had all these super tacky Hawaiian shirts.
SPEAKER_14: And then it was this cool thing to wear with like skinny jeans. Do you, this is like a thing, right? Yeah, that was totally a thing. And it's still kind of a thing now.
SPEAKER_13: These days, high-end designers are making versions of Hawaiian shirts. Hawaiian shirts are in style. And we just thought it was the most hilarious trend.
SPEAKER_14: Like why, it just seemed so ridiculous to us to like wear a Hawaiian shirt with Ray-Bans. Like we would never do that. Well first of all, they wouldn't call them Hawaiian shirts.
SPEAKER_13: No one would say Hawaiian shirt in Hawaii.
SPEAKER_14: That just sounds ridiculous.
SPEAKER_13: In Hawaii, they're Aloha shirts. And they're slightly different. The Aloha shirt is a very common thing to wear in Hawaii. Everyone has an Aloha shirt.
SPEAKER_14: And it doesn't look the same as a Hawaiian shirt. I don't know about you, but I think of Hawaiian shirts as having like tiki heads and bikini ladies on them.
SPEAKER_13: Aloha shirts are a little more professional. Aloha shirts are like more toned down, you know, like really tasteful floral prints.
SPEAKER_14: If you're going out to a nice occasion, you would wear an Aloha shirt. Really? Yeah, it's a very common thing. Most men own one. But it's definitely still a product of colonization. You know what I mean? Like it's not like back in the day, Native Hawaiians were all walking around in like Aloha shirts. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_13: Articles of interest. A show about what we wear. And so maybe the idea is about clothing.
SPEAKER_11: You can attach. Our idea is about class.
SPEAKER_00: An idea of home to a piece of cloth. These are best for last.
SPEAKER_00: Any fool can wear clothes, but if you ain't got the attitude and style to carry it off, man, you're just a clothes boss.
SPEAKER_05: And then we make markers, which are the jigsaw pieces of the shirt. That is the sound of an Aloha shirt maker wielding a giant industrial blade.
SPEAKER_13: And he is cutting through about 50 layers of brightly patterned fabric stacked in a pile.
SPEAKER_05: He's cutting all of the puzzle pieces out. And these cut pieces of fabric will fit together like a perfectly planned jigsaw puzzle.
SPEAKER_13: And so this stack of 50 fabric squares will create 50 Aloha shirts.
SPEAKER_05: Right here is the back of the shirt. That's the placket. That's the front panels. That's the yoke. There's the collars and the pocket over there. Jason Morgan, the general manager of Kahala Sportswear, is showing me around Kahala's factory and design studio on Oahu.
SPEAKER_13: Kahala makes Aloha shirts, and it's actually one of the earliest companies to do so. It's been around since 1936. And as Jason and I watch this worker deftly cut out the puzzle pieces in the stacks of shirts, you can see that all the different parts are strategically placed along the pattern of the fabric. So Jason informs me with pride. So we always match our pocket. And so that is why that pocket is specifically placed right there.
SPEAKER_05: When Jason says match the pocket, he means that the breast pocket of the shirt doesn't disrupt the overall pattern.
SPEAKER_13: Like the breast pocket will be a continuation of the design so that it blends in at first blush. You don't even notice it. It seems like it's a lot of extra effort.
SPEAKER_05: It signifies a higher quality garment, just more attention to detail.
SPEAKER_13: There are a few ways to tell if you're looking at a real, authentic, high quality Aloha shirt. If the pocket matches the pattern, that's a good sign. But it's not the be all, end all. Much of the understanding of an Aloha shirt is about paying attention to what is on the shirt itself. If it tells a story and it has real references that are specific to Hawaii.
SPEAKER_05: If there's a fish in the print, we know what fish that is and that you can find it out here in the waters around the islands. You know, we're not going to slap something on a shirt just to do it because it looks cool. It's not about a fantasy vacation land. It's about a real place.
SPEAKER_13: All the animals, all the fruit, all the landmarks will all be real and significant to Hawaii or to the many cultures that have melted into it. How would you describe this?
SPEAKER_05: So this is a classic paryo. And the paryo is just a simple one color ground, one color print. The paryo print is a classic pattern of Kahala's since the 60s. It's white flowers on a solid color background.
SPEAKER_13: This paryo pattern features breadfruit flowers because breadfruit was a primary staple of a lot of Polynesian cultures. I'm going back to what they call the canoe plants, which were the plants that the Polynesians took with them as they explored Polynesia.
SPEAKER_05: And as they explored, Polynesian sailors discovered Hawaii and migrated there in significant numbers.
SPEAKER_13: These kinds of specific cultural references, or rather specific multicultural references, are what makes the difference between AlohaWear and ResortWear. ResortWear is global in its appeal, whereas AlohaWear is more informed by what makes Hawaii unique.
SPEAKER_05: It's something that bankers wear in downtown Honolulu.
SPEAKER_13: And it's true. Bankers are in Aloha shirts in downtown Honolulu. Everybody is. They even wear them for funerals. And part of the logic of Aloha attire is, of course, that it's just too hot in Hawaii to wear a suit. But that doesn't explain why the shirts are so colorful and patterned and fun. They could have just as well worn plain white shirts, hypothetically. Truly, to understand the origins of the shirt, one must understand the origins of the state.
SPEAKER_06: Aloha kakiha. Blah. Gotta pronounce it correctly. Aloha kakahiaka. That's good morning in Hawaiian. This is Zita Kup Choy, the historian of Iolani Palace.
SPEAKER_06: Iolani Palace is the last official residence of the monarchs who ruled Hawaii as a combined kingdom for 100 years, and whose predecessors ruled here for over a thousand years prior to that.
SPEAKER_13: Iolani Palace is the only actual bona fide palace on United States soil.
SPEAKER_06: Throne room, ballroom, reception room. Formal receptions here. Receptions in the blue room would have included food, beverages, and entertainment. Iolani Palace is truly elegant, with sumptuous wooden staircases and crystal glassware,
SPEAKER_13: and what was then cutting-edge technology. They had electricity in 1887.
SPEAKER_06: Four years before the White House in Washington, D.C. The king also installed a telephone.
SPEAKER_13: Oh yeah, by 1889 Honolulu probably had more phones per person than any other city of the same size anywhere else in the world.
SPEAKER_13: This is all just to say, Hawaii as an independent constitutional monarchy transcended its tiny geography. The kingdom was technologically advanced and known diplomatically all over the world.
SPEAKER_06: Queen Lidio Kalani, our last monarch, is in the portrait on the wall over here. In this portrait she is wearing the gown that was created to be worn at Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in London.
SPEAKER_13: Lili'uokalani became queen of Hawaii in 1891. And she was a musician as well.
SPEAKER_06: She was a musician. She composed over 150 different songs, including Aloha Oe.
SPEAKER_06: It's a really famous song. Aloha Oe is actually a love song. Aloha Oe means goodbye to you. It was written in 1878. She saw a woman and a man saying goodbye to each other. And it was such a touching scene as she was coming home. She's humming and writing in her head. She had a wonderful ability to write songs.
SPEAKER_13: So we're talking about Lili'uokalani because she's a major character in the story of how Hawaii became a territory and then part of the United States. Which led to the rise of the Aloha shirt. And in many ways, this all starts with sugar. Sugar became a minor industry until the Civil War when the sugar planters in the United States could no longer grow because they were fighting the war.
SPEAKER_06: So the sugar indices skyrocketed in influence and in income.
SPEAKER_13: Most of the sugar plantations were owned by Americans and Europeans. Many of the Hawaiians may not have had the money to be able to buy the property some of the immigrants did.
SPEAKER_06: Particularly those that had family that had money. The European and American sugar magnates who had been setting up plantations all over the Hawaiian islands worked their way into the legislature of Hawaii to give themselves better deals on shipping and tariffs.
SPEAKER_13: They imposed a constitution that dramatically reduced the power of the monarchy into more of a figurehead. The constitution also allowed non-Hawaiian citizens to vote. And allowed non-citizen residents of American and European ancestry, basically it was those who could read or write English or some other European language to vote.
SPEAKER_06: So it disenfranchised more native Hawaiians, left out the huge Chinese community. If you're letting the Europeans vote, why can't we?
SPEAKER_13: This allowed American and European business interests to meddle in Hawaiian government even more. And so, with what little power she had, Liliuokalani tried to get that imposed constitution repealed.
SPEAKER_06: Her attempts to put into effect a new constitution caused a group of 13 local residents of American and European ancestry to create the Committee of Public Safety to protect their own interests. That's the group that deposed Liliuokalani.
SPEAKER_13: The long and short of it is that well-connected businessmen used the U.S. military as backing for a coup. In 1893, the monarchy was overthrown and a provisional government was established. And the queen was accused of treason.
SPEAKER_06: And then they arrested Liliuokalani. They brought her here to this room. This is called the imprisonment room. This is where she was held under house arrest, very sparsely furnished, and initially no writing materials. For eight months, Liliuokalani was prisoner in this front room of Iolani Palace, where the sunlight streams in hot.
SPEAKER_13: And for lack of writing materials, Liliuokalani and her one permitted companion sewed. She made a quilt from brocaded silk fabrics and ribbons from her own wardrobe, and she stitched them with the names of her friends and supporters. Embroidered are the words, imprisoned at Iolani Palace. And that says, we began this quilt there, which means they completed it elsewhere.
SPEAKER_13: The quilt was probably completed after Liliuokalani moved to her private residence down the street, where she continued her life as a private citizen until she died in 1917. She was considered until her death as queen of Hawaii and respected as such.
SPEAKER_13: And the queen's quilt would not be the last time a story of Hawaii would be told in cloth. From overthrow to statehood, Hawaii was in sort of limbo as a territory. The sugar industry had changed everything, from the Constitution to the configuration of the government to the actual makeup of the population of the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiian Islands from the late 1800s up to 1924 were the scene of many different immigrants coming into work in the sugar industry.
SPEAKER_09: The sugar plantation owners, mostly white Americans and Europeans, recruited field workers from China, Korea, the Philippines and Portugal.
SPEAKER_09: But the main group came from Japan. This is DeSoto Brown, the historian at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.
SPEAKER_13: And the federal government of the United States ended Asian immigration in 1924, but by that time, the population of Hawaii was about 40 percent ethnically Japanese.
SPEAKER_09: So on Hawaii, there was a huge market for Japanese products, including Japanese fabric.
SPEAKER_13: The Japanese fabric was a width which was made specifically for kimonos, which is the Japanese national costume.
SPEAKER_09: And there was one particular company in downtown Honolulu that was called Musashia. Musashia sold Japanese fabric, and you could go in and choose the fabric you liked and they would make a shirt for you.
SPEAKER_13: So you could buy a Western style collared shirt made out of kimono fabric. It became a fun, special thing to buy, especially for the youths.
SPEAKER_09: By about 1936 or 37, local manufacturers then began to have fabric custom made with tropical or Pacific or Hawaiian motifs, in addition to the Japanese motifs which were already available.
SPEAKER_13: Kahala, the company you heard cutting the piles of shirts, was established in 1936, and it was one of the first to mass produce Aloha shirts. Because these shirts sold like hotcakes as souvenirs when Americans first started coming to Hawaii en masse, as soldiers and as tourists. And so it was always intended to be like souvenir shirts.
SPEAKER_05: For GIs, there was the desire to have something as a reminder, a token, a souvenir of the experience. And then when they went back home after World War II and all that, they brought that trend back with them.
SPEAKER_13: But Aloha shirts were still niche. People didn't wear them around in a real way. Even on the territory of Hawaii, it looked like the West had won. Everyone was dressed like they lived in an American metropolis. Prior to 1962, it wouldn't be unusual to see everybody in downtown Honolulu wearing a suit and tie.
SPEAKER_04: You know, it'd be 90 degrees outside with 90% humidity and everyone's walking around in a suit and tie. It was ridiculous.
SPEAKER_13: This is Josh Feldman, CEO of Tori Richard, which is a resort wear company, and the parent company of Kahala, the Aloha wear manufacturer. So Josh's father, Mort Feldman, was the founder of the company, and even he, the founder of a resort wear company, used to wear a suit and tie to work every day. My father in the 1950s and 60s, he's wearing like a total madman suit, you know, pocket square. He's a dapper looking guy.
SPEAKER_04: But it's kind of farcical, right? That you're in the middle of the Pacific on a kind of tropical island and you're wearing a suit and tie to work every day.
SPEAKER_13: Josh's father joined forces with some other Aloha attire manufacturers, and they formed a lobbying group called the Hawaiian Fashion Guild. And in 1962, they began a campaign called Operation Liberation. It's all started with Operation Liberation, which was to get men to wear Aloha attire in the summer months.
SPEAKER_13: And Operation Liberation, the Hawaiian Fashion Guild gave each state representative and senator two Aloha shirts, and then they took it a step further.
SPEAKER_04: They decided, let's lobby and get the state legislature, just the state legislature, on Fridays to wear products from Hawaiian manufacturers.
SPEAKER_13: They got a resolution passed in 1967, formally creating Aloha Fridays.
SPEAKER_04: That required all the state legislatures to wear this product. That meant every Friday, members of the state legislature wore Aloha shirts.
SPEAKER_13: And then that spread to the business community as a way to support the manufacturers.
SPEAKER_04: And then people, once they started doing that, they're like, hey, this is a heck of a lot more comfortable than wearing a suit. And that went on for a number of years and pretty much every day became Aloha Friday. On any given day of the week in downtown Honolulu, you can see people in Aloha shirts.
SPEAKER_13: Not in a Jimmy Buffett vacation kind of way. It's a workplace casual kind of way. And to this day, this especially ramps up on Fridays. And if you live in the mainland United States, this notion of a casual Friday might sound vaguely familiar to you. Casual Friday has its origins with Aloha Friday.
SPEAKER_04: And casual Friday would go on to affect how we all dress at work.
SPEAKER_13: Not just in Hawaii, all over the United States. The casual Friday campaign started and everyone credits Dockers.
SPEAKER_04: Dockers is a company that makes khakis. And they are owned by Levi Strauss jeans.
SPEAKER_04: They fully acknowledge that the concept was created here. They do.
SPEAKER_02: We're here on the West Coast, Aloha and the Prince. Once Aloha shirts hit the scene, Levi's started manufacturing them.
SPEAKER_13: We'd actually been doing Aloha shirts since the 30s here at Levi Strauss and Company.
SPEAKER_13: This is Tracy Panick, historian at Levi Strauss and Company. But you needed a companion piece. And we introduced in the early, in the 90s, we introduced the idea to human resources departments.
SPEAKER_02: That you could let your workers come to work dressed one day a week in something a little bit more casual. Dockers, for instance. And with Dockers, Levi's really created the concept of business casual wear, which they then sold to businesses.
SPEAKER_13: We took the idea to human resources departments.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, we created a kit, how to put casual business wear to work. And we sent thousands around to HR departments and in it, it included a guide to what was appropriate wear. And in this guide that we're looking at, here's a man dressed in his Dockers slacks and a collared shirt and other clothing that he could wear. Aloha Friday came from Hawaii, but casual Friday came from Levi Strauss and Company.
SPEAKER_13: We are credited, Levi Strauss and Company, for creating Business Casual Fridays, this business casual movement.
SPEAKER_02: And now it's not just one day a week. A business casual for many workplace environments is OK all through the week.
SPEAKER_13: This might be one of the largest seismic shifts in recent fashion history. This turn to casual. A cotton and orlon dress with detachable color and cuffs and plastron buttoned front.
SPEAKER_07: Goodbye silk ties and garters and stockings and knowing how to use an iron.
SPEAKER_13: Ship shapes the word.
SPEAKER_08: Hello to CEOs in sweatshirts.
SPEAKER_13: And it's not that casual Friday invented casual wear. That is a much larger phenomenon that has its roots in the rise of leisure time and the rise of sportswear and the influx of college students dressing more practically to traverse campuses. What casual Friday gave us was a foot in the door to help casual wear spread into public life. Where does casual break in terms of when does it start to be worn to churches?
SPEAKER_11: Regional specific.
SPEAKER_13: This is Deirdre Clemente, historian of 20th century clothing and fashion and author of the book Dress Casual. And she says business casual was this tipping point because the office was kind of the last vestige of everyday formal wear. The office was the last place to break, which I think because it's such a public front.
SPEAKER_11: The places where people had more interaction with clients like maybe banks say or somebody who was a sales rep who had to go into it. Those guys kept the most formal elements of clothes.
SPEAKER_13: And yes, many bankers and politicians still wear suits. But for a lot of industries now where workers sit in front of a computer, they don't need to change into heels or iron a jacket.
SPEAKER_11: I think casual dress speaks to Americans desire to be comfortable. It speaks to our desire to create in many ways a classless society. Or at least the appearance of a classless society.
SPEAKER_11: So I think the rise of casual dress in the United States speaks to America as a nation where everybody considers themselves middle class, no matter who you ask. 70 percent of Americans, poor or wealthy, call themselves middle class.
SPEAKER_11: Casual dress really speaks to everyone's sort of wanting to dress more towards the socioeconomic middle than the edges. It's almost uncool to dress up too much now.
SPEAKER_13: Dressing up would call too much attention to yourself. And in that way, the Aloha shirt is a beautiful aberration.
SPEAKER_14: When I think of Aloha shirts, I think of my dad because my dad wears almost solely Aloha shirts. He has probably 100 Aloha shirts because he wears one to work every single day. And he's like obsessed with buying different ones where he'll get really into the pattern and be like, oh, I really like this textile or whatever.
SPEAKER_13: An Aloha shirt is bright. An Aloha shirt is colorful and bold. And it tells a story. Yes, about a fish or a bird or a plant. But also, quietly, about the whole history of a little chain of islands that left an outsize imprint on the world.
SPEAKER_10: Painted on the things we love.
SPEAKER_13: Articles of Interest is made by myself, Avery Truffleman. Edited by Joe Rosenberg. Music by Ray Royal. Intro and outro themes by Sasami Ashworth. Fact check by Graham Haysha. Mix by Kelly Coyne. And Roman Mars is the big kahuna of this whole series. Thank you to Dale Hope, Linda Arthur Bradley, Vic Wong and the Alcatraz Islanders, Cora Currier and Michelle Lee at Jams World. As well as Katie Mingle, Vivian Lee, Delaney Hall, Kirk Colstad, Sharif Yousif, Sean Rial, Emmett Fitzgerald and the whole 99PI team. Mahalo.
SPEAKER_10: There's a portrait painted on the things we love.
SPEAKER_03: USA for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, responds to emergencies and provides long-term solutions for refugees in places like Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and many more. UNHDR supports people forced to flee from war, violence and persecution at their greatest moment of need. Every day, displaced families struggle to meet basic needs like providing meals and clean water for their children. For many, the last few years have been the hardest. The global repercussions of war in Ukraine leading to steep rises in the cost of basic commodities like food and fuel combined with the climate crisis and COVID-19 formed a triple threat. Because of the commitment of their compassionate donors, UNHDR sends relief supplies and deploys its highly trained staff anywhere in the world at any given time. UNHDR is able to deploy within 72 hours of a large-scale emergency and jumpstart relief and protection assistance. Help deliver urgent aid. Your support can provide life-saving care and hope for a better future. Donate to USA for UNHCR by visiting unrefugees.org slash donation. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out, remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_13: The rise of casual wear, in many ways, has been the rise of synthetics. You start to see America's really accepting synthetic fibers, acrylic fibers going into sweaters, Dacron, all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_11: You know, all the name brand, DuPont-sponsored fibers going into sweaters, menswear, huge menswear with synthetic fibers breaking. Huge. For good reasons, we are sick of trying to fit into our clothes, and we want our clothes to fit us.
SPEAKER_13: We want stretch. We want a little give. We want flexibility, which comes at a price. Your next article of interest is denim.
SPEAKER_12: The number one doctor-recommended multivitamin brand. Because for every bit of love you give your new baby, make sure you give yourself love, too. Visit centrum.com to learn how Centrum is collaborating with Postpartum Support International to help put moms first.
SPEAKER_08: When the weather app says rain, the McDonald's app says McDelivery. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. I'm participating in McDonald's. Delivering prices might be higher than at restaurants. Delivering other fees may apply.
SPEAKER_01: Nissan has a car for everyone. Every driver who wants more. Whatever your more is, more fun, more freedom, more action. From sports cars, sedans and EVs to pickups and crossovers, with Nissan's diverse lineup anyone can find something to fit their more. Get more revs in their sports cars, more guts with all-wheel drive, and more than enough options to fit your driving style. Nissan can take you where you want to go. Learn more at NissanUSA.com
