Prepare For the Return of the Hawaiian Shirt

I hate the be the bearer of bad news, but guys — Hawaiian shirts are making a comeback according to the Huffington Post. And they have some serious evidence to back that claim up, given that several big name designers (Prada and Saint Laurent, to name just two) have recently embraced Hawaiian florals on their runways.

Hawaiian shirts, known as aloha shirts in their country of origin, are colorful short-sleeved button downs typically worn by men who might also gravitate towards the socks with sandals look. According to HuffPo and Wikipedia, these shirts first gained popularity in the 1930s and have gone in and out of style ever since. They were all the rage with celebs like Elvis and Bing Crosby during the '50s when America was obsessed with "tiki culture" (boy do we love cultural appropriation in this country). And now it seems the twenty-tens are the era of the luxe aloha shirt. HuffPo writes:

According to the Wall Street Journal, aloha shirts are back in a big, and expensive, way. Bergdorf Goodman has invested heavily in Hawaiian-inspired prints this year; Hedi Slimane designed a $840 shirt for Saint Laurent this year and Prada is selling$1,500 long sleeve Hawaiian print shirts. (That's a bargain: Because long sleeve styles were printed for only a short time, an original long sleeve aloha shirt once sold at Sotheby's for $10,000.) Forbes has called the resurgence the "Hawaiian print redux," and GQ recently featured Pharrell Williams sporting a Prada aloha shirt in a story that wondered whether "Oahu is the new fashion capital of the world."

When my boyfriend, now a devotee of the official boyfriend button-down, was an awkward middle schooler, he exclusively wore Hawaiian shirts procured at Kohl's. When I told him that the style was once again rising from obscurity, he said "That trend should stay buried in the grave where it belongs." Both he and Kohl's have put their darkly unfashionable pasts behind them, so why are so many decidedly fashionable labels trying to dig Hawaiian shirts out from the proverbial donation bin?

Can I blame hipsters for this? I'm going to blame hipsters.