Virtual Museum Debuts with Aloha

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Mar 11, 2010 By Nadine Kam

If you like to go snooping in other peoples' closets, the University of Hawaii Apparel Product Design and Merchandising Program has the show for you.

Closet voyeurs can now peek into the program's Historic Costume Collection from the privacy of their own home, thanks to the University of Hawaii Virtual Museum.

The costume collection is the museum's featured exhibition, marking the start of a move to digitize the university's vast holdings, with the aim of eventually making it easy for the general public to search out everything from the 250,000-specimen insect collection in the Department of Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences, to the 250-piece fish bone reference housed in the Anthropology Department Archaeology Program.

The pieces in the costume collection number 20,000, but the exhibition focuses on aloha shirts, with 52 examples tracing the shirts' evolution beginning in the mid-1930s. The shirts reflect the influence of design elements from native Hawaiian and Hawaii's many immigrant cultures, and their rise coincided with tourism and the need to bring home items representative of the islands. Included are examples of 1940s silky shirts, as well as the palaka that is a legacy of plantation days.

The UH aloha shirt collection is one of only two such collections in the western United States, and the only one in the Pacific, according to Dr. Michael Thomas, digital collections manager of the University of Hawaii Virtual Museum, who is trying to secure funding for further development of the museum.

The museum project was started in fall 2009 by Jennifer Halaszyn, a student in the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program. A collaborative internship project, it involved several faculty, staff and volunteers to photograph and upload images, while bringing the various campus museums and departments together through one Web site.

FOR CAROL D'Angelo, curator of the collection and a longtime professor in the APDM program, the extra help is a dream come true.

"I do as much as I can, but we have no budget and the collection keeps growing. It's huge, with 20,000 items, but few people get to see it," she said.

With no physical space for a museum, she has organized small exhibits on campus and off, with the largest held last fall when Ala Moana Center made a vacant store space available for the "Fifty Years of Fashion in Hawaii" exhibition that tied in with its own 50th anniversary celebration.

"It would be nice to have an aloha wear museum in Waikiki, where both visitors and residents would be able to see it," D'Angelo said. "We got a huge response at the 'Fifty Years' exhibit, from local people and tourists, although nobody has volunteered to give us $1 million to maintain the collection."

The collection has been in existence since the 1960s, when the APDM program started inheriting clothing from community members who understood the importance of preserving Hawaii's clothing legacy, from traditional apparel that arrived with immigrants, to family businesses that focused on aloha shirts and muumuu, to young designers of the 1960s who reinterpreted mainland pop culture trends to suit an island lifestyle.

D'Angelo said one of the treasures of the collection is a kimono dating to the 1850s, following Japan's opening to trade with the West. "It's gorgeous," she said, making a note to herself to include it in the next round of photographs for an exhibition of kimono.

In the early days, D'Angelo said the collection was kept in boxes on the ground floor of Miller Hall, and her introduction in the 1980s was memorable in her discovery of a centipede nestled in their midst. "I ran out the door screaming," she said.

Today, the collection is kept in a more spacious, climate-controlled environment, thanks to Linda Arthur, a former APDM professor and author of "Aloha Attire: Hawaiian Dress in the Twentieth Century," who pursued better facilities for the collection.

Even so, because of the size of the collection, D'Angelo said she often turns down donations when pieces are not in good shape, but it's a difficult task.

"People understand this is everybody's history, and sometimes they want to give us a wedding gown with pictures of their wedding. People expect us to take care of it. There are so many stories and memories tied to clothing. People always remember what they were wearing during the special occasions in their lives."

NADINE KAM / NKAM@STARBULLETIN.COM

The University of Hawaii Historic Costume Collection had its largest showcase last fall at Ala Moana Center. Now, about 50 of its aloha shirts are on view as part of the UH Virtual Museum. (Click through the photo gallery to see some of the shirts on exhibit.)

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