Alfred Shaheen Hawaiian Print Pioneer Dies

Alfred Shaheen, a textile manufacturer who revolutionized the garment industry in postwar Hawaii by designing, printing and producing aloha shirts and other ready-to- wear items under one roof, has died. He was 86. Shaheen died Dec. 22 of complications from diabetes in Torrance, where he had lived for the last five years, his daughter Camille Shaheen-Tunberg said.

After World War II, many servicemen and servicewomen returned to the United States from Asia and the Pacific Islands with aloha shirts that had been made in Hawaii since the 1930s. Tourists began flocking to Hawaii in the 1950s as faster airplanes allowed for easier travel and the former U.S. territory became a state in 1959.

The tropical-print shirts for men and sundresses for women became standard and sometimes tacky souvenirs for travelers, but Shaheen raised the garments to the level of high fashion with artistic prints, high-grade materials and quality construction.

Even Elvis Presley wore a Shaheen-designed red aloha shirt featured on the album cover for the Blue Hawaii soundtrack in 1961.

Born into a family established in the textile business, Shaheen maintained high standards by controlling the process from start to finish at the factory he built in Honolulu. He hired professional artists and silk-screened their designs on silk, rayon and cotton fabrics he imported to Hawaii. Then his seamstresses cut and pieced together garments that were sold at his own shops and other retail outlets in Hawaii or exported to the mainland and around the world.

“He was a genius," Dale Hope, art director for the Honolulu-based Kahala shirt maker and author of “The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands," told The Times. “He knew more about the inner workings of all of the elements of printing, the garment business and wholesaling and retailing and distribution. He was really a bright, sharp and smart man."

Linda Arthur, a professor of textiles and clothing at Washington State University who has written extensively about the Hawaiian fashion industry, said that “before Shaheen came along, there was no Hawaii garment industry. There were mom and pop stores but no real modern industry."

Shaheen was born Jan. 31, 1922, in New Jersey, where his father and grandfather owned textile mills and clothing stores. He moved to Compton with his family when his father decided to relocate. The elder Shaheen would travel to Guam to buy silk for the family's custom women's wear line, and after falling in love with Hawaii on stopovers, he moved the family again, this time to Honolulu in 1938.

Shaheen returned to California the next year to attend Whittier College, where he studied math and engineering and starred on the football team. After graduating in 1943, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces and became a fighter pilot in Europe during World War II.