Hawaii's aloha shirts to the rescue?

As President Obama, his Congressional adversaries and plenty of sweltering Americans struggle to beat the heat both literally and figuratively this week, they might find relief by embracing that symbol of laid-back (and often kitschy) cool, the aloha shirt.

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July marks the unofficial 75th anniversary of Hawaii's "wearable postcards," whose debatable origins have been traced to Pacific kapa cloth (pounded and dyed tree bark), Japanese kimonos, the tail-out shirts of Filipino immigrants and vivid Tahitian prints.
Though Honolulu tailor Ellery Chun trademarked the term in the 1930s, the garb gained official visibility in 1947, when the city's chamber of commerce amended an earlier resolution allowing open-necked shirts during the summer to specifically include the aloha shirt and its loud, colorful patterns. Celebrities from Elvis Presley to Tom Selleck were enthusiastic ambassadors, and soon every Hawaiian tourist worth his plastic lei was bringing one back as a souvenir of paradise.
Flash forward to this summer, when the Japanese government launched an energy-saving campaign encouraging workers to stay cool by ditching starched shirts and black suits for more casual alternatives - including aloha shirts.
"The most important thing when wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a bold pattern is to wear it with attitude. Then you'll look good," advises clothing manufacturer Ryoichi Kobayashi, who has a personal collection of 4,000 aloha shirts made from the 1930s to the '50s.
"The feeling of wearing Hawaiian shirts is summed up by the saying, 'wearing the wind,' because the wind goes through inside the shirt," Kobayashi adds.
Which, considering the sauna-like weather and stifling rhetoric in the Nation's Capital this week, might be just what Congress and Hawaii-born Obama need.