From American Pop Culture Kitsch to High-end Japanese Reproduction: Cross-border Imaginative Geographies of the Aloha Shirt in European Menswear Retailing

The Aloha shirt is a pop culture fashion classic with origins in the islands of Hawai‘i. The shirt is symbolic of creolisation - adopted by native Hawaiians, but with origins in Portugal, the Philippines and Japan. Originally sold to tourists as beachwear and brought back to the mainland USA as souvenirs, after World War II the Aloha shirt became an item of everyday American wear (Arthur, 2006; Bahng & Reilly). Decades later, the 1990s retro revival of mid-century American popular culture cemented the Aloha shirt’s status as kitsch (Morgado, 2003; Morgado & Reilly, 2012). More recently, the Aloha shirt came to be hailed as a timeless icon of classic men’s style (Sims, 2011). Like many staples of classic menswear such as raw denim, flight jackets and loopwheeled sweatshirts, Aloha shirts are manufactured to a very high specification by Japanese reproduction clothing brands such as Sun Surf and Buzz Rickson (Marx, 2015). Having crossed borders from the USA to Japan and then back to the West, these Japanese reproduction Aloha shirts are sold at a high price point by specialist menswear boutiques in the UK and mainland Europe. This paper uses visual discourse analysis of European e-commerce sites to examine the imaginative geographies (Goodrum, 2005) through which Japanese reproduction Aloha shirts are marketed in Europe. The Japanese Aloha shirt is presented here as a product of Appadurai’s (1986) global cultural flow, Japan’s colonial modernity (Christy, 1997) and Japan’s post-war relationship with America (Hendry, 2000; Mettler, 2018). This paper argues that the shirt’s status as icon of American mid-century style and holiday wardrobe staple is superseded by narratives of Japanese manufacturing excellence. This mobilisation of craft consumption (Campbell, 2005) is approached in terms of Japan’s invention of tradition (Vlastos, 1998) and self-orientalising practices (Tobin, 1992; Kikuchi, 2004).