How white nationalists hijacked the Hawaiian shirt

By Matthew Sweet

They’d been growing underground for months – years, possibly – on the gloomier levels of the internet, where the dank memes live. But lockdown and the early-summer sunshine made them rise in the civic spaces of America. Blowsy hibiscus flowers. Cycad leaves. Fat yellow pineapples. The bright, cheerful blooms of armed, dangerous, white, alt-right America.

Fascism has a history with fashion. In the 1930s the Nazis designed their own shirts and commissioned Hugo Boss to produce them in black and brown. Their modern American cousins buy them off the rack at high-street beachwear boutiques. The “Boogaloo Boys” as they are known, an amorphous coalition of gun-loving anti-statists, white supremacists, preppers and libertarians, have adopted the Aloha shirt as regulation. A garment once associated with golfing seniors and barbecue dads now wraps the bodies of American militiamen gagging for a second civil war.

The Boogaloo Boys are harder to classify than previous generations of right-wing militias. Some of their actions are predictable, like holding rallies against gun laws and coronavirus safety measures, but they’re also turning up in their tropical togs to Black Lives Matter (BLM) marches. This is not always, as some reports have suggested, to insist on the importance of White Lives – but because they hate the cops. “We’re against the state,” a smooth-faced young man told BLM protesters in Texas on May 30th: “We won’t stop you burning down the police station.” He was wearing a baseball cap, a Kevlar jacket and a short-sleeved shirt, hot with yellow and turquoise flowers.

This Aloha habit first became legible in late 2018, when Joshua Citarella, a visual artist who studies online culture, noticed the shirts adding colour to the plainer alt-right ensemble of streetwear, assault weapon and bottle of Jack Daniels. Like so much extremist culture, the trend developed from a confluence of internet jokes and memes – the same kind of semiotic tangle that spawned Pepe, the amphibian mascot of anti-liberal politics, from 4Chan gaming slang and the image of Kek, the frog-headed Ancient Egyptian god of Chaos. The word “Boogaloo” is borrowed from a film, “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”, a hastily shot 1984 sequel to a popular break-dancing movie. When an activist posts a picture of himself in a respirator and Aloha shirt and pronounces himself “ready to boog”, he’s casting himself in the sequel to a well-known historical event starring Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. A further pun, “big luau” – the name for a Hawaiian hog roast – encodes hostility towards the police and it leads, somehow, to cotton printed with palms, petals and piña coladas.

Want a less convoluted explanation? You’ll find it in a self-published novel from 2019 by an author who writes under a pseudonym, Carl Snuffy. (Nobody knows his real identity: he’s the Elena Ferrante of alt-right gun-fan forums.) “Boogaloo” is set in the near-future during an internecine conflict in which armed American Marxists – whose battle cry is “For BERNIE! FOR AOC!” – have taken refuge in the sewers much as the Viet Cong occupied the Cu Chi tunnels. On the eve of his first battle, the hero is issued with a Hawaiian shirt to ensure that no one mistakes him for a member of the hated Antifa, an amorphous group of anti-fascists: “If we have these on…we won’t get shot at by the cops or vigilantes.”

In Honolulu, which many of the Boogaloo Boys doubtless refuse to believe is President Barack Obama’s place of birth, there is understandable disquiet. “We’re Hawaii”, thundered the capital’s main newspaper, “and we want our shirts back.”

The seed is sown Shirley Temple 1937
The history of the early Christian church is only marginally less complex and obscure than the origin story of the Hawaiian shirt. In the 1920s American tourists took home floral-patterned kimonos and pyjamas from their Honolulu holidays, but a shirtmaker called Musa-Shiya Shoten was the first, in summer 1935, to place an ad for a shirt cut from the same cloth. The garments were a bargain: 95 cents for “well-tailored, beautiful designs and radiant colours”. A rival, however, copyrighted the term “Aloha shirt” and took control of the narrative. The story became increasingly disputed during the course of the 1930s when film stars such as Robert Taylor and Shirley Temple bought blooming blouses and popularised the trend. Taylor, unlike Temple, didn’t pair his with white shark-skin shorts.

Beating the bush “From Here to Eternity” 1953
Some alternative creation stories about the Aloha shirt mention small groups of Hawaiians who commissioned them for special occasions in the 1920s; college footballers on tour to Canada who borrowed the fabric from their parents’ Japanese maids; the Hawaii University Rifle team; and the charitable ladies of the Central Union Bazaar. During the war in the Pacific they were adopted as a recreational uniform – a trend captured in this still taken on the set of Fred Zinnemann’s “From Here to Eternity” (1953). His characters are infantrymen stationed on the island of Oahu, where a “loose, flowing sports shirt” is standard gear for brothel-creeping. (“We just dress up in civvies and we’re as good as the rest of the world, ain’t we?” Frank Sinatra asks Montgomery Clift.) The garment also erases the difference between officers and men – obliging some to re-inscribe it with violence.

A late bloomer Harry Truman 1951
“Man wears shirt” may not sound like much of a news story but in the 1930s the arrival of a multicoloured gift from a relation in Honolulu was sufficiently significant to trigger a cute little paragraph in the local press. The track-and-trace system records sightings in Manhattan, Kansas (October 1936); Guthrie, Oklahoma (September 1937); Santa Ana, California (ditto). Some recipients thought them too daring. (“Thanks for the shirt,” one wrote back. “What am I supposed to do with it?”) Fifteen years later, the story flipped. This example, spotted in Key West, Florida, made the cover of the Christmas issue of Life magazine in 1951. The leader of an atomic superpower, wearing noisy leisurewear to demonstrate his capacity for ordinary American ease.

It’s a jungle out there Elliott Gould in “M*A*S*H*” 1970
Watch any Vietnamese film about “the American war”, the sort in which the American-backed Saigon forces are the enemy, and you’ll notice that the villains – CIA military advisers, boorish South Vietnamese officers – take their R&R in garish rayon shirts. Watch Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H*” from 1970, an American film about the Vietnam war masquerading as an American film about the Korean war, and it’s the rebels and refuseniks whose clothes are the loudest. When Elliott Gould’s “Trapper” John wears an Aloha shirt to golf his way around the killing fields, it’s a sign of his instinct for peace – an instinct, you may notice during the infamous shower scene, that does not extend to the war against women.

Roses are radical Hunter S. Thompson 1994
Old-style hacks – the ones you met in the movies, anyway – wore a clean suit and a fedora with a press card tucked in the hatband. The new 1970s school of gonzo journalism required a different uniform. If, like its founder, Hunter S. Thompson, you intended to crash into your story, change its temperature, annoy, displace or seduce its subjects, and dissolve your objectivity in tequila and dope, then you needed workwear that would bear a bit of creasing, with a pattern in which a vomit stain might hide. Thompson didn’t wear one on every assignment, despite the imagery generated when Johnny Depp played him in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. But we must honour his genius by failing to let a caveat spoil a perfectly decent paragraph.

Say it with flowers “Magnum P.I.” 1984
There’s an episode of the 1980s detective series “Magnum P.I.” that concludes with the elderly villainess commanding her trained macaw to attack Tom Selleck’s impressively unwaxed detective hero. The scene that follows is typical fare: bright-red plumage flaps and threshes around Magnum’s multicoloured torso, bullets fly, the bird sails upwards and is diced by the blades of a passing helicopter. It’s the shirt that shows us we’re not supposed to take all this too seriously. Magnum’s gaudy display is part of the decorative irony of 1980s post-modernism, which produced candy-coloured poolside architecture and flocks of artificial pink flamingos – places where significance could take a holiday.

Still in bloom Khalid 2019
The Hawaiian shirt has always moved promiscuously between sex barriers. In the 1930s, it was marketed more aggressively towards women than men, often with the addition of matching shorts. Ninety years later, that difference has been elided, and neck-to-thigh foliage has become a male summer standard. The thicket is particularly dense at the kind of music festival where a platinum ticket buys you out of the queue for the chemical toilet. Here, R&B megastar Khalid – who once spread himself over all top five places in the billboard R&B chart in America – is communing with the audience at Coachella. That, or asking the other BMW owners in the audience to identify themselves.■

IMAGES: Getty, The Photo Access/MediaPunch, N.R.Farbman/Bishop Museum Archives, LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/Getty, Alamy