The “Aloha Friday” tradition began in Hawaii in the 1960s for a surprisingly commercial reason: local Hawaiian shirt manufacturers lobbied, gifting shirts to state legislators, to normalize wearing them at the office and support the local textile industry.
The habit stayed local for decades, until Silicon Valley companies, helped along by Dockers’ (Levi’s) marketing campaigns in the 1990s, turned it into “casual Friday” – and eventually into the whole modern “business casual” category.
What started as a regional shirt-selling strategy became, a few decades later, the standard dress code of offices worldwide.
Very few style rules have an origin story quite this commercial, given how “natural” they now feel.
See also: