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| Passion Investments: Textiles |
Aloha Dreams
Richard John Pietschmann
08/01/2005
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In fact, the $10,000 Hawaiian shirt
mark has already been breached in a sale to Japanese collectors by Seattle
vintage clothing wholesaler Larry McKaughan. His Heller’s Café sold a mint
condition Thousand Tigers shirt for $15,000—by all accounts the most yet paid
for a Hawaiian shirt. Indeed, Japanese collectors have demonstrated voracious
demand for the best aloha shirts for years; they account for half of McKaughan’s
sales of shirts priced in the four figures. Collectors in the United States
are woefully uninformed about this demand, he notes, and are often startled at
the heady interest in the Far East.
VALUE JUDGMENT
Aloha shirts—vintage Hawaiian shirts from the 1930s through the 1950s—have
reached collector status and are trading in the four-figure range, although the
first five-figure sale was recently made. As limited supply becomes concentrated
in a small number of high-end collectors, prices are expected to continue their
rise. The most prized shirts are the “silkies,” those made from fine rayon that
went out of production in the mid-1950s. |
For the first time, provenance is bearing
on the valuation of aloha shirts, a sure sign of a maturing collectible market.
A pair of lavishly illustrated books on vintage Hawaiian shirts has created an
entire class of so-called book shirts—alohas marked as particularly valuable
simply by appearance in their pages. The Hawaiian Shirt, published in 1984,
ignited the market, and Dale Hope’s more comprehensive The Aloha Shirt,
published in 2000, validated it. They provide a comfort level for prospective
buyers and a price bump for sellers. That effect is especially evident on eBay,
where much of the vintage aloha market has migrated and where sellers will often
reference one of the two books with a page number to reassure buyers.
Cultural Contrivances
Gary Moss, a Boston-area professor who has about 170
shirts worth about $125,000, hit on a different way to bestow provenance on his
collection: He exhibited them for six months last year at the American Textile
History Museum in Lowell, Mass. He plans to sell them one at a time on eBay.
Each shirt will have a certificate of authenticity verifying that it has been in
a museum exhibition and, if appropriate, the page number where the shirt appears
in a book. “In some collectibles, provenance enhances value tremendously,” Moss
says. “We’ll see what it does for Hawaiian shirts.”
 |  | | THE BLACK and white fantail fish shirt was made by Catalina. The red shirt with
a diver on the back was made in the 1950s, when California manufacturers
realized the vast popularity of Hawaiian sportswear. (Photography by Ric Noyle; Top: Dale Hope Collection. Bottom: Joe Guzzo Collection.) |
Paul Klink, the
Hawaii-based chairman of a technology company, is one of a handful of top-tier
collectors. He began assembling his cache in 1985 and estimates that his several
hundred shirts are worth nearly $1 million. “I don’t know anybody else at my
level,” he says. “I don’t know of any shirt that I want and don’t have, and if I
did, I would get it no matter what the price is.”
Though Klink has one of the
most extensive aloha shirt collections in the world, he keeps the majority of it
in Japan, protected from the ravages of the Hawaiian climate. This makes him
virtually unknown among collectors in the U.S. But he is one of the few American
collectors who understands and deals in the Japanese segment of the Hawaiian
shirt market; he trades in aloha shirts there, as well as in other parts of the
world where his business takes him.
An impassioned enthusiast, Klink calls
collectors who are unwilling to fly off to far-flung locales for a single-shirt
auction “fakes.” The thrill of the hunt that animates Klink is missing today,
many longtime collectors agree. The few thousand top vintage Hawaiian shirts are
concentrated in the hands of several dozen collectors. “Most of the best shirts
are probably already in the hands of collectors, and everyone else is on line or
at the flea market,” says Danny Eskenazi, a Seattle-based collector and dealer
who buys and sells via the Web. “The hunt is 51 percent of the [satisfaction],
if not way more, and the thrill of finding something great has been greatly
diminished.”
“It’s more about money now,” says McKaughan, who has been a
high-end used clothing dealer for two decades and whose company has annual sales
of $1 million. “My sense is that [collecting Hawaiian shirts] has moved away
from purist appreciation into a commodity market. It is not that today’s
collectors don’t love the shirts, but in the ’60s and ’70s you had to perceive
something as a collector that wasn’t obvious to everyone.”
While supply
diminishes and demand soars on the open market, the most collectible vintage
Hawaiian shirts—the best of the silkies—are enjoying greater appreciation, both
aesthetic and material, than at any time in their history. “They are genuine
folk art masterpieces of Americana,” Eskenazi says. But he adds that collectors
must remember what aloha shirts represented to their original buyers a half
century and more ago—a leisurely lifestyle.
Dolben agrees. “I can wear a
shirt that I paid a thousand dollars for on casual Friday, but there’s not
anybody in my peer group who would know it, other than they look at me and say,
‘Wow, what a cool shirt.’”
Richard John Pietschmann has written for Newsweek and The New Yorker. pietsch3@aol.com
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