The end of World War II brought waves of homeward bound GI’s to the shores of Hawaii where they bought and returned home with colorfully printed “Hawaiian Shirts.” Levi’s was quick to offer their own version of the Hawaiian shirt as part of its growing sportswear line.
Big American companies all tried to capture the exotic brilliance of the tropics with new lines of summer sport shirts in the early 1950's. They had access to larger factories for fabric and sewing pus national distribution to sell their lines of "Sport Shirts". They ran large advertisements in the magazines of the day like, Esquire, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Evening Post to promote their casual shirts.
