How a Push to Sell Hawaiian Shirts Led to the Creation of Casual Fridays

In a recent episode of the informative series Today I Found Out, host Simon Whistler explains how the Hawaiian Fashion Guild started a trend that would eventually lead to the creation of “casual Friday”.

In 1962, the Hawaiian Fashion Guild began pushing to make the iconic Aloha shirt (better known in the mainland States and abroad as a Hawaiian shirt) an acceptable piece of business attire. …Although Aloha shirts were already a thing in mainland America at this point, and had been since the 1940s when American GI’s serving in the Pacific theatre brought them back after WW2, the idea of Aloha Friday didn’t make its way to the mainland until around the early 1990s, when cash-strapped businesses affected by a brief recession began looking for a way to raise employee morale without spending any money. The result- “Casual Friday”. Within a few years, this had spread across the entire country.