I was 14 years old when I first went to Hawaii, a spring break trip for our family of five to descend on the white sand beaches of Honolulu from our snow-white house in the suburbs of Chicago. Style was the first thing on my mind and the last on my family's; they embarrassed me all week long in their Tommy Bahama Island shirts (Dad) and too-casual sweatpants worn to dinner (Mom). I was so busy being embarrassed by their getups that I didn't look around to see what the locals were wearing.
Things have changed, of course, since 1999. In Honolulu Street Style, Malie Moran, Attila Pohlmann, and Andrew Reilly give us a glimpse into the city's diversity and island-urban aesthetic. "Diversity" is not just a buzzword here: no single ethnic group composes a majority in the Island State, "the result of a continuing influx of people who leave their homelands and seek a new life in the Hawaiian Islands." Some of these people came for a new life working on Hawaii's vast fields of sugar cane and pineapple plantations. Others came as missionaries from Europe and America. Residents of Micronesia have fled their sinking islands in droves, landing on Hawaii's shores due to its proximity both in geography and environment to their disappearing homeland.
The writing isn't great—"The ying-yang tattoo on his bicep provides an added aesthetic," for instance—but the glory of the book is its ample gallery of photos in situ: a young woman poses in front of a storefront, two friends stand side-by-side in a parking lot, a man in an orange tank top reclines at an outdoor art studio. The point is to capture Honolulu fashions in their natural habitat.
Books like these have their detractors. Fashion reporter Suzy Menkes wrote about Scott Schuman, photographer behind the style site The Sartorialist: "This photographer of 'real people' has spawned legions of imitators, just as the editors who dress for attention are now challenged by bloggers who dress for attention." Menkes yearns for a return to an understated aesthetic (if such a thing can ever be said to have been the norm—look at the ostentatious Egyptians with their beading and feather embellishments! The ornamental clasps of the Greeks! Victorian-era cravats and top hats!). The question always sitting just beneath the surface of these kinds of critiques is, inevitably, about class. Who has access to capital-F Fashion? Who deserves to be taken seriously? Who looks "natural," and who looks like they're playing dress-up?
These questions and others posed by fashion insiders elucidate the enormous class gap in the world of fashion. This is exactly where Honolulu Street Style goes very, very right: Instead of looking to capture peacocks strutting their stuff, the book strives for verisimilitude, an admirable (and uncommon) trait in an industry that typically disregards the mundane in favor of the outrageous. A book with an entire section on the "Aloha shirt" would have to try very hard to be élitist.
Street style is a relatively new category in fashion. With the advent of the factory and the proliferation of department stores, it became easier and cheaper to buy mass-produced clothing than to make it at home. "This change," our guides suggest, "reflected a shift from the modern to postmodern condition … . Dress scholar Marcia Morgado cites rejection of authority as a key characteristic of postmodern fashion; derived from rejection of authority are also elements of mixing, irony, androgyny, vintage, and kitsch."
Morgado's observations are substantiated throughout the book. Here is a woman with long, bejeweled nail art. There is a man with repurposed hairdresser's scissors around his wrist. And what about the woman with a Hello Kitty tattoo on her forearm, the man in a kilt, the woman in menswear? This is what the book calls "genuine documentation" of real people, people whose fashion sensibilities are not so much determined by the latest issue of Vogue as by their peers. The dress is more casual than you would see in many other big cities, which is part of the appeal of setting the book in Honolulu. In a city where Aloha shirts are considered formalwear, the variety of casual dress is going to call for creativity.
The draw of documenting a particular place's style is the same as any other historical impulse to record. Street photography began in Paris with men like Eugene Atget and Henri-Cartier Bresson. Neither set out to train his lens on fashion, but their interest in capturing everyday moments on city streets was an important factor in the development of street style photography. As fashion came down from the ateliers and parlors and onto the streets, a movement began. At first, most of these photographs were taken without the subjects' awareness. They were unposed, rushing from work to the store or walking with friends, caught in an easy state of being. In their excellent book Bystander: A History of Street Photography, Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz recall the work of photographer Robert Frank:
He was just intercepting their movements with the camera … . I remember when one girl putting on lipstick raised her chin a certain way and pursed her lips. Robert went for that little pout she was making. Suddenly, the girl had become a woman. A moment later she was just a little girl again putting crayon on her mouth, but that split second before she had leapt into womanhood.
Nowadays, street style photography is much less candid. Photographers camp out between hotels and runway shows to get just the right shot of fashion editors and bloggers, who might change outfits several times a day. Not so in Honolulu, though. Trends tend to look similar when played out in the big cities of the West—you could be forgiven for not being able to pick out whether an outfit is from the streets of Paris, London, or New York. But this book isn't about high style, even on the streets. You're more likely to see clothes from H&M than Hermés in Honolulu Street Style.
The book also showcases downtown Honolulu. Graffitied walls serve as backdrops for many of the fashionable subjects, as do chain link fences and parking lots dotted with palm trees. The message seems to be that Honolulu is both highly distinctive and, in many ways, just like any other city of several hundred thousand people. It's a tropical destination, to be sure, but it's also dotted with abandoned buildings and corner stores and office buildings. We can't have street style without the street. While we may be tempted to think of Honolulu—and all of Hawaii, for that matter—as a tropical paradise, this book confronts us with the fact that it is a very lived-in city. Its influences are Japanese and European, Chinese and Puerto Rican, industrial and touristic, ancient and futuristic, and Honolulu Street Style is true to that wild mix.
Laura Turner is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. She is an MFA student at Seattle Pacific University.
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