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Planning on flexing your sartorial muscles in the blog arena? You’ll need to come packing. And no, we’re not referring to your pocket square game. Every week on The Eye, we’ll cover a basic term you need to know right now... before you get laughed off the internet.

It looks like it’s going to be a wavy season. And no, we’re not playing weatherman, we’re talking about all those loud, patterned shirts. Once a pop culture castoff (the stereotypical garb for overweight tourists), the Hawaiian (or Aloha) shirt is returning to its storied roots. Vibrant prints peppered with pineapples, surfers, leis, and pretty much anything else even remotely related to the beach have been trimmed down, and elevated from clueless to cool.

To trace the circuitous route of the Hawaiian shirt, we’ll of course be landing in the Aloha State. But our journey begins further back, before what we now know as the state of Hawaii was born.

In the early twentieth century, the Hawaiian islands experienced an influx of immigrants coming in to work at the many plantations. The climate catered to cash crops like sugarcane, and the island’s South Pacific location made it easy to export the crops. As these workers came in from across the world, they brought with them their culture’s respective garments-of-choice. The Japanese brought along their kimonos, Filipinos introduced the straight hem, the shirt collar came down from the States, and the native Hawaiians, well, they’d been wearing bright patterns for centuries. Mix all of these factors in a sartorial brew, and you have the quintessential Aloha shirt. Plantation workers in the ’20s worked the field each day wearing an early version of the short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, but the tourists would solidify the shirt as an icon of the islands.