Alewa: History in a Print and a Pleat
This is taken from the essay “Alewa Print Narrative” — part of the RISD Museum’s collection along with samples of this print. Gina Gregorio designed it in 2014, with my art direction, for Language of the Birds.
Inspiration
Alewa Heights Photo: Daniel Ramirez
My work is centered on aloha prints and the muʻumuʻu form.
Alewa was one of the first Language of the Birds prints. Initial prints and forms were developed in tandem. This probably contributes to my feeling that the Alewa print is most compelling when expressed on a traditional Hawaiian dress form. So this essay will talk about the print and the holokū form together.
I was interested in tropical urbanism as a way to discuss Hawaiʻi as a lived experience in contrast to a vacation experience. Honolulu is a densely populated city on Oʻahu. The mountains form a green, verdant spine in the middle of the island. Neighborhoods are nestled in the valleys and climb up the sides of the range. These areas fall outside the scope of the tourist experience.
One of these neighborhoods is called Alewa Heights. Alewa is the Hawaiian word for suspended. I found a Hanae Mori print about a town that I thought was compelling. I put together a file folder of art direction and gave it to Gina to design this print.
A traditional holoku worn by Princess Kaʻiulani. Photo: Bishop Museum Archive. Hanae Mori Print. Ruth Asawa sketchbook.
And here is the realized print:
Alewa partial repeat. Gina Gregorio
Look Book 2014. Photos: Doug Lloyd
Some History
To contextualize this work it’s important to understand the history of Hawaiʻi.
I offer this brief history as a layperson, not as a historian. The bibliography provides sources for this information.
The Hawaiian island chain has been inhabited for more than a thousand years by Hawaiians. To a Eurocentric eye it looks like an island chain in the middle of the ocean. For Polynesians it is the northern reach of their culture. The language, the practices, and the people all confirm this truth. What was read by colonizers as the "middle of the nowhere” is actually an integral part of Polynesia.
Polynesia viewed with an overlay of historic migration.
The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi played realpolitik for hundreds of years with colonial powers (Europe, US and Japan). It survived social changes and disease, integrated immigrant communities and new belief systems, invented a written language, created a constitutional monarchy, and in general adapted to a series of significant cultural shocks with great resilience.
For instance, in the nineteenth century Hawaiʻi had an almost 100% Hawaiian literacy rate with ten Hawaiian language newspapers in circulation by the 1870s. Iolani Palace, the royal residence, had electricity before the White House. The palace was electrified in 1886 after King Kalakaua met Edison in New York. Honolulu streets were lit by electricity in 1888, a mere 8 years after NYC. This era of technological innovation and modernizations is referred to as the first Hawaiian Renaissance.
Iolani Palace Entrance. Photos: Bishop Museum Archive.
In 1893 a consortium of pro American businessmen and sugar plantation owners overthrew the government, imprisoned the leadership, and forced Hawaiʻi to become a US territory, which ended in 1959 with US statehood. This coup was part of a greater colonial expansion and is historically bound up with the US gaining control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba as part of the terms at the end of the Spanish American War.
At the time many Americans decried this expansion, but others welcomed it as reflected in political illustrations and op eds in US publications at the time.
Political cartoons 1898. Philadelphia Press. Detail from Harper’s Quarterly “Uncle Sam’s New Class in the Art of Self Governance '' Note “Hawaii” and ”Porto Rico” reading quietly in the corner. Source: Library of Congress
The Hawaiian coup is an extension of America’s “Manifest Destiny,” a 19th century justification for white christians to settle the Western US (and by extension the world) via a divine preordination, with prejudice and disregard for the people living there. Even as I write this down it sounds utterly insane.
The coup and illegal territorial expansion is at the heart of all current issues in Hawaiʻi, whether water rights/wild fires on Maui, the military’s poisoning of groundwater at Red Hill on Oʻahu, the Thirty Meter Telescope project at Mauna Kea, or the pesticide test fields on Kauaʻi. Hawaiʻi is an ongoing site of contention with a continuing struggle around land rights and autonomy.
Imprisonment Room, Iolani Palace, which today displays a quilt Queen Lili’uokalani made during that time.
The monarch at the time of the overthrow, Queen Liliʻuokalani, was imprisoned for a year in Iolani Palace. The Palace is a significant site of psychic anguish around this event. Justification for the overthrow rested on a colonial narrative of “backwards natives” which necessitated a suppression of the vibrant, technologically adept, and progressive Hawaiian culture. As a result, subsequent displays of “Hawaiianness” can be interpreted as, in part, a protest. The overwhelming threat of force on the part of the US, especially during the first half of the 20th century, led to the near extinction of the Hawaiian language and made these displays covert and/or complex to avoid direct confrontation.
During the colonial period, “Hawaii” was many things to the US. A strategic stronghold, a timeless paradise, a reward for capitalist success - in other words, a fantasy akin to how the French viewed Tahiti. Or similar to the collective imagination around “The American West”. In all these fantasies there is some truth and a lot of fiction.
The 1970s birthed the second Hawaiian Renaissance in which cultural practices, Hawaiian language, and other artistic expressions were revived. The native Hawaiians (Kānaka Maoli) rights movement had much in common with mainland civil rights movements and used similar tactics. It had vast cultural ramifications from the reinvigoration of cultural forms like Hula to the creation of Hawaiian immersion schools. It also continued to affirm, albeit with internal tensions, the multicultural nature of Hawaiʻi. The choice of dress consciously reflects the complexity of culture.
Protests against evictions in Kalama Valley, considered the start of the Second Hawaiian Renaissance. Photo: UH Archives
Haunani-Kay Trask leading a 1993 demonstration to mark the overthrow of the Hawaiian government.
On the other hand, the popular culture tropes that commodify Hawaiʻi belie this complexity. And these simplistic touristic tropes just won’t die. Like the undead they rise over and over again in unaltered and unironic form. (On mobile, zoom in)
Images: W magazine profile about 2016 of Hawaiʻi. All commentary is mine. Limnander, “In Hawaii, the Mood Is Chill and the People Are Eclectic.”
Almost identical photographs from the 1950s and the 2000s fostering colonialist narratives with very little to no irony.
The Muʻumuʻu Form
Photo: Blenda Montoro Miller
Before I understood the history of Hawaiʻi I was drawn to aloha wear. Because of the serendipity of time and place (Chicago in the 1990s), thrift stores were awash with dresses acquired on Hawaiian honeymoons in the 1960s and 70s.
A souvenir, worn once perhaps on vacation, then viewed in the cold, harsh light of a Chicago winter, stuffed into the back of a closet, and finally discarded thirty years later in almost new, unscathed condition.
I wore them in all types of contexts without understanding the history, wowed by the outlandish prints and unusual shapes. I was keenly aware of how inappropriate they were to the mainland, how tacky people thought they were, and put them on as some type of punk gesture. I wore them until they were threadbare and the zippers broke. Until the hems fell out and ripped. Until they were rags.
I loved them before I knew their names. I loved them before I knew what they meant or who made them. I loved them and I had never been to Hawaiʻi. I loved them for what they were when I found them. I loved them unreservedly, like a fool.
Examples of nineteenth and early 20th century muʻumuʻu
Fashion and history are bound together in Hawaiʻi. Beneath aloha wear’s sunny surface is the complex discussion of “Hawaiianess.” And you can find this history, like the devil, in the details. Nostalgia plays a big part in the clothing. At first glance it appears to be backwards-looking, old fashioned stubbornness. A quaint ossification or a fly preserved in amber.
But as Susan Stewart states in her seminal work on the souvenir:
“[Nostalgia] is always ideological…the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. Hostile to history… and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin”
Stewart, On Longing p. 23.
Nostalgia is usually a deeply conservative concept, a mourning for a lost, “better” past. Svetlana Boym calls this “restorative nostalgia” and delineates it:
“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one…it can create a phantom homeland…
Yet the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition…”
Boym, "Nostalgia"
In this case I think the longing and mourning is not for an imaginary origin point, but is linked directly to an actual historical event, the overthrow. This nostalgia is, perhaps, not hostile to history.
Let me explicate this-but make it fashion.
The quintessential dress form associated with Hawaiʻi is the muʻumuʻu. When the missionaries came to Hawaiʻi in the nineteenth century they brought a number of fashion “innovations” coupled with a good deal of Christian body shame. For propriety, missionaries advocated Hawaiians wear “Mother Hubbard” style dresses, a full length, long sleeved, bib front dress with a train. This dress was adopted throughout Polynesia. In Hawaiʻi it is called a holokū.
The holokū was then shortened so it didn't have a train and called a muʻumuʻu, which means “cut off or shortened.” Originally a muʻu was meant to be informal and the holokū formal. Modernity loosened the rules about women’s dress and the muʻu became accepted daywear.
Examples of twentieth century holokūs. Photos: Malia of Hawaii. Unknown. Blenda Montoro Miller
To me the muʻumuʻu and holokū are a single form across a continuum from the intimate to the formal. It's a truly inclusive form in size, occasion, and utility. It has an unusual flexibility. The form evolves overtime to reflect the era's tastes and cultural influences. It developed variants like the day dress holomuu. It can tease out shades of cultural identity as it does with the pake muu. Note: Pake muu and holomuu are usually presented without the okina.
It has been used to express political views. After the overthrow, Queen Liliʻuokalani wore a black holokū as a symbol of protest. In the 1950s it played a role in statehood boosterism, think Pearl Harbor, Trader Vics, and Blue Hawaii. In the 1970s it became a reference to an idealized royal past, think the second Hawaiian Renaissance. To this day the benevolent society, ʻAhahui Kaʻahumanu, continues to wear black holokūs and yellow leis to honor Queen Kaʻahumanu. But at its core the holokū/muʻu is a comfortable, maximalist dress for both work and play.
The Muʻumuʻu can be both dressed up for a party or used as an everyday work dress. These two photos express that nicely. Cheryl Tiegs for Vogue, 1970 Photo: Helmut Newton. Making Haupia Photo: Hawaiʻi State Archives.
A Note on Hawaiian Prints
The apocryphal beginning of the aloha Shirt - Wong’s Drapery Shoppe.
Integral to these dresses are the large scale prints that festoon the form. There are a lot of apocryphal stories about the origin of these prints. One I particularly like is that Wong’s Drapery Shoppe helped create the aloha shirt for college bound Hawaiians going to the mainland who needed something both warm and that felt Hawaiian. Wong’s initially used thick Japanese upholstery fabric for the warmth so the print scale became locked in as Hawaiian. (from Dale Hope, “The Aloha Shirt”)
These prints also reaffirm the multicultural history of Hawaiʻi. They may refer to Japanese Kimono fabrics, European ditsy florals, Indonesian batiks, and traditional kapa patterns. They may be designed “authentically” by a native Hawaiian, a kamaʻāina (a local), or someone who moved to the islands with the same amount of respect afforded to the work.
An effort was made to create the modern Hawaiian print using local themes in the 1930-40s. This has been much lauded in Alfred Shaheen’s work. Also consider Elsie Das who is credited with creating the first aloha prints. Elsie Das was an American of Danish descent who went to art school in California. In 1950, the Honolulu Advertiser wrote “Elsie Das can lay close claim to being the originator of the aloha print.”
“In 1936 GJ Watamull commissioned his wife Ellen’s sister Elsie Das to create 15 hand-painted floral designs on silk for his family’s East India Store. Das is credited with pioneering the aloha shirt as we know it today; Hawai‘i’s scenery, from the Ko‘olau Mountains to palms, volcanoes and beaches…
…Elsie and others started to create their own designs substituting what had traditionally been Japanese styled motifs and prints on the imported fabrics.”
Young, “Elsie Jensen Das.”
Her approach to print shows a sophistication and a worldliness at odds with the stereotypes about “isolated” Hawaiʻi. Compare her ulu print with the great 20th century print designer Josef Frank. The similarities indicate a deep understanding of print design and trends at the time. Ulu is a culturally significant food in Hawaiʻi. Also known as breadfruit, it was one of the “canoe plants” brought over with first human habitation.
“Breadfruit” Elise Das for Watumull’s. “Hawaii” Josef Frank for Svenskt Tenn
The Watteau Pleat
A watteau pleat example from Language of the Birds. Photo: Meredith Heuer.
An 18th century french sack dress. Lei with a vintage holokū. Photo: Naomi Yoshida.
The most distinctive part of the holokū is the watteau pleat the falls along the back. The pleat has been a part of the holokū since the 1820s when Hawaiians saw Boston missionaries wearing sack dresses and loved that detail. They were a revival of 18th century French court dress, hence the name of the pleat. These dresses, even at the time they came to the islands, were already out of fashion on the mainland.
The Hawaiian version of this sack dress has a lowered back neckline modified (I think) for the proper wearing of a lei. A lei is meant to drape slightly over the back rather than like a necklace that sits tight against the back of the neck.
The watteau pleated holokū has never really gone out of style in Hawaiʻi. It was used as a formal dress throughout the 20th century, often for weddings. Depending on the taste of the era, the holokū became more or less body conscious, more or less bohemian. But no matter what the pleat remained.
A variety of muʻu and pareu forms on Kahoolawe Island activists meeting the Lieutenant Governor of Hawaiʻi. Photo: Hawaiʻi Star-Advertiser 1976
The Second Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s also brought back other muʻu forms like the modest Mother Hubbard. All these forms signal “Hawaiianness” and are of a piece with the music, hula, and language.
So this strangely anachronistic pleat persists on the modern holokū form. And its stubborn resilience intrigued me since it increases cost and complexity to the garment. I knew it must have some strong semiotic meaning to survive unaltered for 200 years.
I started deeper research and came across the fashion historian Linda Boyton Arthur. She posits:
“The holoku...has been definitive of Hawaiian ethnicity…Old Hawaii came to an end with the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893; the cultural tension from this event has never been resolved, and visual reminders of Old Hawaii continue to be used to show kinship with the failed monarchy. The holoku- is one such reminder.”
Linda Boynton Arthur. "Fossilized Fashion in Hawai‘i."
This reminder, this remnant, is not a romantic nod to the past. It is a weaponization of Victoriana to further the conversation about the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the trauma therein.
It is an example of what Boym calls “reflective nostalgia”
“If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and specialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and demoralizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another... ”
This “cherished fragment” executed in a fun, playful print longs for a different historical outcome.
And I was here for it.
Language of the Birds Watteau dress in Tofino. Photo: Meredith Heuer
I shortened the holokū form to modernize it, ostensibly making it a muʻumuʻu, but preserving that beautiful pleat- I think this form would be properly called a holomuu.
And then I married it to my prints, with the Alewa feeling the most “uncompromising” in terms of its portrayal of lived, urban Honolulu. This particular combination sold out immediately and is often requested by clients. This is how I know it is a resonant form/print combo for people.
Language of the Birds Watteau dress in Alewa. Photo: Meredith Heuer.
Conclusion
A few years ago my friend Naomi Yosida sent me a photo of herself at the foot of the stairs in Iolani palace wearing a Watteu dress in Alewa. When this form was placed into the context of Iolani Palace it seems to create that space of “reflective nostalgia” in a way that is both nuanced and sensitive to its context.
Naomi Yoshida in Watteau dress, Iolani Palace, 2022.
Bibliography
Boym, Svetlana “Nostalgia” Atlas of Transformation, Odehnal, Martin, tranzit, 2011.
Boynton Arthur, Linda "Fossilized Fashion in Hawai‘i." Manuscripts, Washington State University.
Cheng, Martha “For the love of muumuu” Hawaiian Airlines. Jan 17 2023.
Hope, Dale, The aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands. Patagonia Works, 2016.
Wilson, Ann “Designer Profile: Elsie Das – Honolulu – Follow the Thread.” n.d..
Young, Peter T “Elsie Jensen Das.” Images of Old Hawaiʻi, July 30, 2018.
Hawaiian History Sources
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970; and Current Population Reports, Series P-23, Ancestry and Language in the United States: November 1979.
“The Birth of Hawai‘i’s Native-Language Newspaper Archive.” Atlas Obscura, August 7, 2018.
“Jan. 17, 1893 | Hawaiian Monarchy Overthrown by America-Backed Businessmen“ New York Times 2012, retrieved.
“The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy” KS’ Ho‘okahua Cultural Vibrancy Group
“Chapter 19. American Empire.” The American Yawp. Stanford University Press Edition, 2013.
“Likely to happen under the coming administration” J.S. Pughe. Illus. from Puck, v. 40, no. 1038, (1897 January 27), centerfold.
“Uncle Sam’s New Class in Self Governance” Rogers. Illus. From Harper's Weekly Harper's Weekly, Vol. 42, No. 2175 (August 27, 1898), cover
“School begins” Dalrymple. Illus. from Puck, v. 44, no. 1142, (1899 January 25), centerfold.
Hawaiʻi’s Territorial Period in Context University of Hawaiʻi, Manoa, college of education a
“The Anti-Statehood Movement and the Legacy of Alice Kamokila Campbell” Whitehead