Funny Kine Clothes the Hawaiian Shirt as Popular Culture
A couple jokes, from _New Yorker _cartoons:
A penguin arrives at work with other penguins, except the arriving penguin is wearing a Hawaiian shirt. "Y'all're kidding," he says. "I thought it was Friday."
A priest in a Hawaiian shirt is delivering a sermon: "And on the seventh 24-hour interval…" he begins. The caption reads "Casual Sunday."
These, and and so, so many more pieces of cultural ephemera, appear in the scientific paper "Funny Kine Clothes: The Hawaiian Shirt Every bit Popular Culture," published in the Journal for Interdisciplinary and Cantankerous-Cultural Studies, a document I would invite you to read every word of ASAP. Its two authors, University of Hawaii at Manoa'due south Marcia Morgado and Andrew Reilly, pored over decades' worth of cartoons, stock photos, and articles, then applied Chomskyan analysis to the body of research.
"We read descriptions of the shirt equally recorded in social and economic histories, news reports, and journal and magazine manufactures; in communication columns and other texts concerned with dress and advent standards; and on websites advertising Hawaiians shirts for sale. We examined hundreds of visual images in books well-nigh the shirt, in commercial photographs available on-line from Getty Images and Google Images, and in cartoons on Hawaiian shirts published in The New Yorker magazine. We considered descriptive terminology, physical characteristics of wearers, other aspects of the contexts in which the shirts signified, and rhetorical and visual techniques on which meanings relied. We extrapolated from the texts, photographs and drawing images to propose terminology that captured the essence of the shirt as depicted in these works." All toward answering a fundamental question: _How did the Hawaiian shirt get the most reviled, and simultaneously revered, piece of habiliment in modern retentivity? _
The answer is… well, it's complicated. The authors, interpreting the mess of documents in forepart of them–and there is a stunning amount of scholarly enquiry on various cultural aspects of Hawaiian shirts, if you want to fall downwards a Google Scholar pit today–clustered feelings on the shirts into 3 groups: them versus usa (tourists wear the shirts, and are ridiculed for it), different versus same (they're a symbol of casual living and working, breaking conformity), and civilization versus commerce (the shirt is romanticized every bit a symbol of true Hawaiian culture). All of which leads to this table, gorgeously, improbably titled "Table 1. Paradigmatic Structure of Iconic Meanings Attributed to the Hawaiian Shirt":
Hawaiian Shirt Meanings
Why the strong feelings? Nosotros only have theories; simply they're decent theories, at least. The shirt actually was a work of Hawaiian industries making bank selling to mainland customers and tourists visting the islands. Meanwhile, "[a]mong the resident population at that place was footling interest in the shirt other than equally a boost to the tourist trade. Furthermore, the shirt was banned for employees of City, State and Federal offices and from banks and corporate offices on grounds that its appearance would induce sloppy work habits." By the 1950s, during a tourism nail, the shirt continued its association with tourists, along with all of the "characteristics typically attributed to the tourist, such as beingness fat, badly dressed, and unattractive became associated with the shirt."
Afterward, a "petition to the State Legislature generated by the local garment industry (along with a gift of two Hawaiian shirts to each legislator) ultimately resulted in a Legislative resolution that promoted Hawaiian shirts as appropriate business wear on the last day of the workweek." On the Islands, that became "Aloha Friday"; elsewhere, information technology was "Casual Friday." Popular civilisation, from the _New Yorker _cartoons above to the stock photos on Getty Images, reflected that idea well into today, turning the Hawaiian shirt archetype into a punchline–repeated over and over. (Some other _New Yorker _cartoon: a man opens the door and sees the Grim Reaper, clad in floral. The man says, "Yous call this death with dignity?")
Yous can read the whole article here, if you lot're curious.
H/T Improbable Research
Source: https://www.popsci.com/article/science/scientific-look-why-you-hate-hawaiian-shirts/