I recently came across this Asian style dress by Lauhala. The fabric is, unfortunately, all polyester. This particular dress is style 4128. The label says "over" but I didn't flip it to see the other side. A potential clue for more information about the dress?
The dress has a Mandarin style collar and interesting bat wing-style sleeves. This kind of sleeve seemed to be popular from at least the 1940s, although I haven't seen any contemporary dresses with this style. The front opening has an interesting decorative piece - not exactly a bow, but sort of like a stiff ribbon. I've seen this same style of decoration on a Hawaiian Togs dress.
I have a Lauhala shirt and I've seen a couple of Lauhala label styles, but I haven't seen this kind before. The label is larger and more elaborate than others I've seen, with two-color embroidery. Based on the more "modern" label and the polyester fabric, I would place this dress around the early to mid-1970s.
Lauhala started as a sportswear manufacturer in 1943. Their headquarters was at 1722 Kalakaua Avenue and subsequently opened another in Hanapepe around 1965.
A bit of trivia regarding the name of the company. The plant embroidered on the label is a Pandanus. This plant looks sort of like a cross between a palm and a mangrove and it has a fruit that looks somewhat like a pineapple. Lauhala is the Hawaiian word for Pandanus leaves used in weaving.
Ok, so I made my first foray into vintage Aloha dresses. I picked up a lovely barkcloth muumuu for a mere $5.00. A really, really big muumuu at that. At first look it seems to be 1960s. But if you make a closer examination, there is much more here than first meets the eye.
The dress has the manufacturer tag as well as a cardboard product tag that has fabric, style, size, and RN number information. But the cardboard tag is not a fabric care label. And interestingly, there is a price tag still attached to the back! The tags have the following information:
Manufacturer tag
An Original
Hawaiian Togs
Made in Hawaii
Size 18
Product tag
100% Acrylic
Illegible printed text
Style: C (in pencil)
Size: 18
RN 23746
Ok, so we have some information to start with. Hawaiian Togs was the manufacturer and I've seen this label come up on eBay and some vintage clothing retailer sites. The RN number tells us the company, once located at 1528 Makaloa Street in Honolulu, had their RN number issued sometime around 1962.
The dress is clearly old. The muslin lining has a patina of age and has darkened. At first look I would say this dress was early 1960s. But there are a couple of things about the dress that might indicate otherwise. First, the Product tag says the material is acrylic. Now the rule-of-thumb I use with Aloha shirts is if the shirt has polyester, then it was most likely 1970s or later. However, I don't know much about acrylic. According to this article, arcrylic was created by DuPont in 1944 and was first made commercially in 1950.
The second odd thing is the zipper. The rule-of-thumb I've used is if the zipper is metal, then it dated from the 1960s or earlier. But this dress has a nylon zipper. Ok, so does this mean the dress is later vintage, was the zipper replaced, or is the use of nylon zippers actually older than I first thought?
Answering the second question is probably the easiest. I looked very closely at the stitching holding the zipper to the dress. At the top of the zipper is a eye-hook closure. This closure has a patina and that discolored the fabric, so it is clear the eye-hook is original to the dress. The stitching between the eye-hook and zipper does not appear to have been disrupted, so it seems the zipper has not been replaced since the dress was first made.
Answering the third question is also fairly easy. Were nylon zippers used in the 1960s? A search of several vintage clothing sites shows that nylon zippers were used in clothing as early as the late 1950s, although they were not very common. This website says nylon zippers began to displace metal zippers after 1963. I looked at the zipper to see if I could identify the manufacturer. I first thought I saw a symbol of a crown, and there is a zipper company called Crown. But upon closer look, it wasn't a crown but rather a shield-shaped symbol with USA stamped within. There is a Flikr site here that has photos of vintage zippers. Some of the zippers are of the nylon type. I'm certainly no expert on either zippers or zipper packaging, so I'll have to accept from multiple sources that nylon zippers were indeed used in the 1960s.
So that leaves the first question. Is the dress of later vintage than the 1960s? There is one more clue to examine. The seams are pinked. According to this website, pinked seams were common in 1950s era clothes, but were displaced by serged seams in the 1960s. It is impossible to tell if Hawaii Togs still pinked the seams of their clothing in the 1960s, but this information suggests serged seams became increasingly common as time progressed. I can only surmise that the later the dress, the less likely it would have pinked seams.
So looking at the totality of the evidence: the nylon zipper, the acrylic fabric, the shape of the manufacturer tag, the RN number, and the seams, I would venture this dress is mid to late-1960s. And as I first mentioned, this dress still has the original price tag and it sold for $29.95. So if the dress was sold for this price in 1967, adjusted for inflation, this dress would sell for $205.88 today! So is this a further clue? Two-hundred dollars for a muumuu seems really high. But I can't tell if the price tag is original to the dress, so I'm going to stick with the original estimate.
