item details
Overview
Salvage Public
Salvage Public was founded in 2013 by Joseph Serrao, Noah Serrao and Napali Souza, who aim to 'make clothes that reflect a Hawaiian way of living: Close to the natural world, at the crossroads of culture' for a global market. They produce high end surf and street wear, including t-shirts, dress shirts and jeans. Nostalgia is part of their brand.
‘We’re a bunch of millennials so we look to the ‘80s and the ‘90s and we remix the culture that we grew up with which was music, surfing and hip hop and all of that. We figure out a way to plug Hawaii into that, so aloha shirts are a part of that story.’ Napali Souza, 2017
Tiki culture
This slim fit aloha shirt is made from commercially produced fabric. While Salvage Public's tailored cut is very contemporary, the generic ‘Polynesian’ style print is reminiscent of ‘tiki culture’ which flourished in the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s giving rise to Polynesian themed bars, hotels and even apartment buildings.
This type of generic tapa or bark cloth print, was popular throughout the 1960s for both clothing and furnishing fabrics as Te Papa’s wider aloha shirt collection demonstrates – for example see FE013115 and FE013085.
Co-collecting in Hawai'i
This shirt was acquired by Te Papa during a co-collecting trip to Hawai'i in 2017. Te Papa worked with Noelle Kahanu, a cultural specialist from the University of Hawai‘i, to develop collection of aloha shirts that reflects the ways in which Hawaiian culture has been historically represented, and misrepresented, through the aloha shirt, and the ways in which contemporary native Hawaiian designers are utilising the aloha shirt to communicate indigenous cultural values. This shirt was purchased from Salvage Public's store in Honolulu.
Te Papa’s co-collecting programmes are guided by the principle of mana taonga – the sharing authority with stakeholder communities.