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. Mainland shirt makers noticed this trend, and were quick to offer their own versions of the Hawaiian shirt as part of their growing collections of sportswear and leisure shirts.
Big American companies all jumped in together to capture the exotic brilliance of the tropics with lines of summer sport shirts in the early 1950's. They had access to larger factories for fabric and sewing with national distribution to sell their lines of "Sport Shirts".
They ran large advertisements in the magazines of the day like, Esquire, New Yorker, and The Saturday Evening Post to promote their casual shirts.
Mainland shirt companies, usually used to making more formal dress shirts worn with ties, also added neck sizes to their labels. Hawaiian companies never adopted this additional touch, as most men never bothered to button their top button in Hawaii. That was not the intended relaxed Spirit of the Aloha Shirt.
