Richard John Pietschmann
08/01/2005
Drew Dolben prefers to display his collection of Hawaiian aloha shirts on his back, not in a gallery. He knows this may diminish their value, but like many aloha aficionados, he finds wearing them is more than half the fun. “If I want to wear a Duke (Kahanamoku) with a sailfish or marlin print, I’ve got one in white, one in black and one in blue,” the Boston-based real estate developer enthuses. “If I want a savage-print shirt, I can choose a Surfriders, a Kamehameha or a Pali.”
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| ALOHA SHIRTS capture the dream of escaping to paradise. The Royal Hawaiian shirt features tandem surfers gliding toward Waikiki Beach as four wahine ride in a wood canoe. (Photograph by Ric Noyle; Dale Hope Collection.) |
Collectors seek silkies with a winning combination of pattern, color, label, condition and size. Large and extra-large shirts are particularly scarce, because these are the sizes sought by many contemporary buyers who, like Dolben, buy the alohas to wear. That sliver of the market niche is the one most heavily influenced by celebrities, sports figures and other casual collectors who will pay almost any price for the right look.
Actor Nicolas Cage, for example, recently visited Bailey’s Antiques and Aloha Shirts, the Honolulu haberdashery that has offered vintage shirts since 1980, looking for an extra large with a particular purple pattern. Proprietor David Bailey pulled one from his personal collection and sold it to the actor for $4,000. Not long ago, he sold a 1950 Art Vogue label aloha with a hula girl back panel to singer Jimmy Buffett for $5,500, his highest price to date. Bailey has heard rumors that a Japanese sumo wrestler paid $8,000 for a “dead stock” (never sold) XXXL aloha.
Eternal Sunshine
| Prime shirts that sold for no more than $25 to $35 in the late 1970s and then roared to $800 to $1,000 a decade later now command prices three and four times greater. |
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| THE DETAIL of a Hale Hawaii shirt is set against Oahu’s famed Diamond Head. (Photograph by Ric Noyle; Randy Hild Collection.) |
Collecting rare antique Hawaiian shirts has evolved from the thrift shop, forgotten-trunk-in-the-attic phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s into a pursuit on par with many refined collectibles. It has captured the fancy of collectors as wily as the sultan of Brunei.
Ron Kleyweg, whose Animal House in Venice, Calif., is one of the few vintage clothing stores left in the Los Angeles area—once a treasure trove of retail outlets selling old Hawaiian shirts—is one of the longest-standing aloha shirt dealers, in business for 32 years. Kleyweg explains that prime shirts that sold for no more than $25 to $35 in the late 1970s and then roared to $800 to $1,000 a decade later command prices three and four times that today. He expects the next surge in prices to come in the near future. “Prices are going to keep going up,” he says. “There will be $10,000 shirts.” Despite these upticks, assembling an important collection of aloha shirts today is still a relatively low-capital proposition. “For less than a million dollars you can still become a major player in this market,” Bailey notes.
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. |
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.”
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| 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.) |
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