07/11/2026
“Hawaiian shirt Fridays” right? Here’s the history behind that name:
One man legally owned the words "Aloha Shirt."
Not the shirt. The words. He registered the name in 1930s Honolulu, held the rights for 20 years, and watched those two words become the most famous thing Hawaii ever sewed. Then he let them go.
Ellery Chun was born in Honolulu in 1909, the son of Chinese immigrants. His father ran a dry goods store at 36 North King Street, in Chinatown. Ellery graduated from Punahou in 1927, then from Yale in 1931 with an economics degree. A kid from King Street holding an Ivy League diploma could have gone anywhere on the mainland. He came home instead - into the worst of the Great Depression, to save the family store.
He renamed it King-Smith Clothiers, after the corner it stood on. Business was dying. His wife Mildred said it plainly decades later: he needed new ideas to keep the store alive.
He found the idea in his own fabric aisle. As he told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1987: "I took patterned Japanese yukata cloth and had a few dozen short-sleeve, square-bottomed shirts made up for me." He hung them in the front window of the family store at about a dollar apiece. And he gave them a name: aloha shirts.
His sister Ethel designed the early patterns - palm trees, pineapples, a flying fish she sketched after her first trip to the mainland. He wasn't the only one cutting shirts from kimono cloth. Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker was advertising his own down the street at 95 cents. Waikiki beach boys wore their own versions. Nobody agreed who was first.
But Chun did the ONE thing nobody else thought to do. He registered the name. "Aloha Sportswear" in 1936. "Aloha Shirt" in 1937.
The name caught fire. By the end of the 1930s, 450 people were working in a Hawaiian garment industry worth $600,000 a year - more than $11 MILLION in today's money. Fortunes were getting cut and sewn out of the two words Chun had claimed.
Here's what Ellery Chun did with the hottest name in the territory.
He walked away from it. He sold the store, joined American Security Bank, and spent the next twenty years as a vice president, approving other people's loans while the world put on his word. His rights to the name ran out after 20 years. No record he ever renewed them. No record he ever sued anyone. No record he ever asked for a dime.
He owned the name the whole world wears, and he let the world have it.
In Hawaii, the aloha shirt became the suit. Every closet in the islands - and every Hawaiian closet in Vegas or Seattle - has the one good one. Pressed and saved. Worn to graduations. Worn to weddings. Worn to funerals.
In 1962, the Hawaiian Fashion Guild gave two aloha shirts to every member of the Hawaii House and Senate. By 1966, the islands had Aloha Friday - the same year, as it happens, that Chun quietly retired from the bank. The custom drifted east to California and kept going, until the mainland renamed it Casual Friday. If your office dresses down at the end of the week, it traces back through Honolulu to a Depression-era window on King Street.
In 1991, the Hawaii State Senate honored a quiet 82-year-old retired banker, sixty years after his first shirts. The state that wore his idea every Friday finally said his name out loud.
Ellery Chun died on May 16, 2000, at 91. The governor of Hawaii proclaimed 2000 the Year of the Aloha Shirt in his honor. And his widow Mildred, remembering how it all started, summed up the aloha shirt in four words: "It turned out well."
His sister Ethel's 64 original printing blocks sit in the Smithsonian now. The rarest vintage aloha shirts bring up to $15,000 at auction. This year, the name he registered turns 90.
Historians still argue over who made the first aloha shirt. Nobody argues over who named it. Ellery Chun gave the shirt its name, then gave the name away. The world wears his word. Now you know his name.
