Originally written in October 2016 for the Baylor Business Fellows newsletter
A cool summer night in downtown San Diego. The breeze is coming off the bay. I’m wandering through the Seaport Village shops, and I see it. It’s hideous. It’s glorious. And it’s on sale.
It was a Hawaiian shirt. Predominantly blue, with pineapples and hibiscus and palm fronds in the pattern. Coconut shell buttons. Made in Hawaii. It would be mine. My first Aloha shirt, to commemorate a fun week at a conference in San Diego.
I got back to Texas and realized the flaw in my thinking. I don’t actually wear Hawaiian shirts. Ever. And I had visited San Diego, not Waikiki. So maybe this wasn’t such a great purchase.
Then I remembered something from past travel to Hawaii: the Aloha Friday. For decades, at the urging of Hawaii’s shirt makers, businessmen began wearing brightly-colored Aloha shirts on Fridays instead of business suits, an early Islander version of “business casual.” What if I just declared Aloha Friday, and started wearing my new shirt on Friday? If anyone were to ask why I had on such a ridiculous shirt, the answer was simple: “Aloha Friday!”
And so it began. The tradition became every Friday that I could get away with once I found several really inexpensive tropical-pattern shirts on sale for under $10 each during Kohl’s January clearance. And then I added some higher-quality shirts to the collection on my last visit to Hawaii in 2013.
For me, Aloha Fridays started as a way to wear some ridiculously obnoxious shirts to work. It signaled to everyone around me that we don’t have to be so stuffy, even if we are a business school.
But most importantly, it was a reminder not to take myself too seriously, to be sure to have a bit of fun and whimsy with all of the other things going on in my days. Let’s face it – it’s hard to get too smug or too proud of yourself when you’re wearing a shirt covered in flowers.
These days, the Aloha Friday has become a bit of a thing. Several of my economics faculty colleagues wear Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. (A former colleague, who was born and raised in Hawaii and does not join in the silliness, sniffed that we “looked like cheap tourists.” “Exactly!” we cheerily replied.) And a few years back, when my ECO 1380 class still met on Fridays, some of the Business Fellows began to join in.
It makes me smile when I see any of you in an Aloha shirt, on a Friday or otherwise. If you decide to wear one of these shirts, I hope you’ll keep in mind the biggest reason that I have continued this tradition as a key part of my own lack-of-fashion choices. It’s a reminder that I’m really not all that big of a deal, that the corner office and seemingly important titles are all just accoutrements to more important things in life, and that putting too much stock in my own importance is just chasing after the wind.