The Best Hawaiian Shirts this side of Honolulu

Pow. Get that colour in your retinas. Florals off black bases always look the blazers, and with the extra void space on this shirt, the hits of chartreuse and purple really tickle your eye pickles.

This Vacay short sleeve from Billabong also comes in a mechanical stretch fabric, so will have some give around the shoulders if you decide to moonwalk onto the dance floor and throw out some sprinklers to douse the crowd.

This vintage-vibe bewty is a part of Critical Slide’s Sultans of Sun Capsule, throws in artist John Zabawa and musician Matt Correia into the collaboration. There is a matching board short too, but let’s not get over excited and go the full haole tuxedo, shall we?

The sun print across a navy base is plenty eye catching enough to have you living it up, slipping shakes, sipping tipples and generally throwing out mad summer vibes.

Talk about injecting some Australiana into your Hawaiian wardrobe – Quik have rolled out the Ken Done colour pallet into all sorts of iconic glory here.

Southern Dream comes in a black base if you want some extra pop, or white if you want something that will transition from the cricket, to the tennis, beach sunsets, then snorting nose beers off the toilet in a Bondi gay bar.

You bloody ripper.

Despite the name, this shirt is more baller than bowling. It has a smooth white base with pops of custom tie die to keep things funky – just in case you’re blind and can’t see the picture. Wouldn’t that mean you can’t read either? I dunno.

The dye effect comes from an ‘Ink Bloom’ process which bleaches the shirt white first, then uses that blank canvas to add hits of colour. It’s a relaxed fit, 100% cotton and 110% money.

This thing is proper fire. Oh yeah, the zingers keep on coming. Considering Australia is still ablaze, it’s probably not the best time to be wearing shirts, or making jokes that even touch the subject.

That aside, this is a pretty bloody rad shirt that you could pull out to scorch the dance floor instead of our lovely country. If you can afford the $195 price tag, you can definitely afford to donate to help support firefighters and wildlife as well. Get on it.

No one gets more noise out of their loud shirts than Mambo. They’ve gone wild recently and collab’ed with a bunch of artists to create a collection that celebrates that history, cranking the saturation up to infinity.

It’s hard to go past this one though – featuring art from OG shirt scribbler Reg Mombasa. With the birds and colours it reminds me of icon Alf Stewart. Don’t be a flamin’ galah and go the board short/shirt combo though.

If this shirt could be summed up in one word it would be fwappah!

Combining simplified mandalas with wave-like swirls, it’s like a cool sea breeze tinged with fresh banana leaf curry. If I’m sounding disoriented it’s because I’ve been staring at the patterns in the Bon too long. Maybe it should come with a warning – may cause seizures and a flood of new Tinder matches.

There’s also another print in the Bon shirt which is a collab with indigenous artist Amanda Wesley. Well worth checking out (link)

Some might scoff that we’ve included a shirt from Target in this collection but, fuck it, it aint half bad. The ditzy micro floral print is a change from the other chubby flowers we’ve seen out there and in a layer of colours does give off a fun effect.

At $20 it’ll leave you with change from a $50 to go and buy a couple of boxes of Tropicana goon from the bottle-o as well. The best thing is that is comes in wetsuit sizing – yup Medium Tall!

You don’t need colour for great Hawaiian shirts. Case in point – this black and white number available over at Mr Porter. Like it’s much cheaper cousin to the left, it uses a more delicate style of flora, but rather than going overgrown, keeps things sparse to let the base colour of the shirt peek from underneath.

At around $350AUD it is up there on the top end of the scale, but it’s also in a design that should last more than one season.