Sun Surf Polynesian Tapa Design Hawaiian Shirt Navy

Undoubtedly the best tops for warmer days ahead, Hawaiian shirts are still the kings of laidback summer style.

Several objects have been handed down and made in Hawaii for centuries. One example is tapa, a bark cloth made by beating the bark of a peeled tree with a stick and stretching it.

Polynesians, who did not have a culture of spinning yarn, used tapa stamps made of bamboo for clothing, rugs and sometimes as a tribute to royalty. This work, in which “tapa” is depicted on the entire shirt by a stamp made of bamboo, was a popular design that appeared in magazine advertisements at that time.

This fabric is custom-made to precisely match the long-lost formula for the type of high-quality rayon employed in manufacturing the original vintage examples. Rayon is a plain weave fabric made from filament rayon (filament yarn) in the warp and weft. It looks beautiful and smooth to the touch and is also cool and comfortable to wear due to its high heat-dissipating properties. At the same time, the fit and shape have been duplicated with care. Sun Surf designs are produced only annually in Japan, and then that design is never repeated.

Sun Surf expertly reproduces in Japan the Hawaiian rayon shirts of their golden age from the 1930s to the 1950s. Since its foundation in the 1970s, the brand has collected thousands of such vintage shirts and even analyzed them to manufacture authentic replicas. In addition to the shirt layout designs, their rich and bright colouration is precisely reproduced using traditional printing techniques, such as discharge or over-printing. We are proud of being one of the few retailers outside Japan offering the most authentic vintage-style Hawaiian shirts in the world.

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