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Exhibit Highlights Arab-American Who Popularized Hawaiian Shirts, Casual Day
If Henry Ford had stuck with watch repair, someone else would have figured out cars. But Alfred Shaheen … there’s a guy who changed my life.
As Big Hank did with Ford Rouge, Shaheen had the skill and vision to consolidate everything he needed in one place, designing and producing the major parts and improving the manufacturing process. Like Ford, he made his creations available to the masses, and like Ford, his original works are still admired and collected.
So let’s raise our mai tais and toast a Lebanese-American engineer from New Jersey, a son of immigrants with a bent for business and a flair for fashion, the most important figure in the entire recorded history of…Hawaiian shirts.
That’s not to minimize Shaheen’s accomplishments. He also made dresses. But it’s the shirts that have enabled me to be what I am today: Chronically underdressed and getting away with it.
I bring this up because I’m fresh from a new exhibit at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn called Hawaii’s Alfred Shaheen: Fabric to Fashion. It’s a celebration of the life and work of a visionary who invented much of his machinery, pioneered the notion of designer boutiques in department stores, and helped create casual day.
For that last achievement alone, he should be on a postage stamp. A very bright one.
Joined family dress shop
Shaheen grew up in the textile business. His family moved to California when he was a kid, then migrated even further west to Hawaii.
He came home to Honolulu after flying fighter planes in World War II and joined the family’s custom dress shop. Shaheen was a young man with a dream — ready-to-wear — but in those days on those islands, fabric was an issue. Shipments and designs were inconsistent, and you couldn’t make a good aloha shirt out of something that looked like Scarlett O’Hara’s drapes.
Shaheen began silk-screening his own material in 1952, hiring artists to create patterns inspired by Pacific Rim cultures. By 1956, he had a 23,000-square-foot factory. By 1959, he was grossing upward of $4 million a year, which in those days would buy a lot of surfboards. He turned a sleepy local industry into something national, and eventually, along with the shirts came a concept Hawaiians know as Aloha Friday.
News anchors there wear aloha shirts on the last day of the workweek, and insurance executives on the mainland wear Dockers. Hang loose, bruddah.
He’s museum material
Shaheen was a natural fit for the museum, says curatorial manager Steve Williams, because “we want to show how Arab Americans are a part of American life and have contributed through the centuries.”
He retired and shut down his factory in 1988, and died 20 years later at 86. But his spirit lives on in people who have figured out that in most situations that call for a necktie, their wives will let them slide with a sport coat and an aloha shirt.
I happily own dozens of them, including a Thanksgiving print and a St. Patrick’s Day print and enough with Christmas themes to get me through all 12 days.
I’d consider it perfectly reasonable if Shaheen’s birthday, Jan. 31, became a national holiday. And if it ever happens, I know just what I’ll wear to the ceremony.
Neal Rubin
Detroit News