Sig Zane-Wearing his Culture with Pride

Want to know something funny about genuine Hawaiian aloha shirts? Most of them don’t feature one genuine native Hawaiian plant.

 

Michael Stein

 

Sig Zane realized that in 1983 when he needed to purchase a new shirt for an aloha shirt dress party. It was a small discovery that triggered a cascade of revelations for Zane about how his chosen art of clothing design could advance knowledge and understanding of Hawaiian culture.
   
Zane created a line of men’s aloha shirts in striking colors like bright green, tan and purple, with elegant designs that forego the typical effusions of plumerias and other tropical imports for ferns, leaves, flowers and trees endemic to Hawai‘i. For our interview, Zane was wearing one of his most subtly enjoyable creations, an aloha shirt adorned with patterns of loulu, Hawaii’s only native palm tree. This particular aloha shirt has a button-down collar because, Zane admits with a grin, “I like that preppy style.”
   
But far more distinctive than Sig Zane’s panache with shirts is the philosophy behind it, the belief that Hawaiian products should embody Hawaiian culture and spirit. Zane’s passion to distill centuries of native Hawaiian knowledge into his fashions makes a trip to his Wailuku clothing store not just a delight, but an education.
   
Zane has the wiriness of a lifelong surfer, and a gentility and humility that seem more suited to a scholar than to a clothing designer. For much of his life his passions were surfing and hula, and his job was selling real estate.

But he’d always had a special connection both to art and to Hawaiian culture. Zane is third-generation Chinese-American; his name, which has such dashing mod style, is a corruption of the Chinese “Jheng,” probably created by a befuddled immigration official.  Both of his grandfathers spoke fluent Hawaiian as well as fluent Chinese, and growing up on O‘ahu and later in Hilo on the Big Island, Zane was constantly exposed to local island ways. He always felt that learning Hawaiian culture was his destiny, especially after a dream in which he married a pure-Hawaiian woman who taught hula—a dream that came true when he married Nalani Kanakaole, a teacher from a hula halau in Hilo.
   
Zane is an entirely self-taught artist who credits as his sources of inspiration his indefatigably creative mother (who was always fashioning baskets and wreaths), the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s, and the great art he observed in Europe while traveling with his parents. When he began making his own clothing in 1978, using an exacto knife to carve woodcut-style designs out of plastic film, his work reflected both an urbane appreciation of art in general, and a native son’s passion for the beauty of the Islands.
   
Zane’s knowledge of plants comes from 20 years of dancing mele hulas, in which plants appear with many layers of meanings, as well as studies in lei-making and native medicine. By replicating a plant, Zane believes he honors it—communicating the integrity not just of the plant but of its meaning as expressed in various chants within the Hawaiian culture.
   
Zane tries to make sure his customers know what his designs mean, not just for their enlightenment but so that they can wear them for appropriate occasions. Koa leaves symbolize a warrior’s strength in mind and heart, and so a koa shirt is ideal for a business meeting, as is a shirt featuring the ‘olena plant, used for purification and cleansing of the mind for a task at hand. For a wedding, Zane advises against wearing a shirt with a hala design, since hala also means to “fall or fail”—but ‘ulu (breadfruit) has the connotation of growth, and the maile plant symbolizes binding.
   
While most of his designs portray plants pictorially and have a flowing, curvilinear rhythm, Zane has also cut geometric kapa-style designs out of strips of bamboo, which he then cuts into chevrons and triangles, transferring that pattern directly to the silkscreen and the fabric. Whatever the pattern, Zane’s salespeople are taught to tell the story behind every article of clothing a customer purchases, because Hawaiian culture is dependent on oral tradition.    Zane has espoused this unique blend of clothing and culture ever since he started at craft fairs, selling T-shirts and sarongs, gradually expanding his output to shirts, dresses, blouses, pillows, bedspreads, slippers, and wall hangings. He opened his Hilo store 17 years ago; almost 4 years ago he opened his Maui store on Market Street because he’s always enjoyed Wailuku. “I feel shopping should be an experience with some ambiance. It’s these old streets, forgotten downtown streets, that have a spirit that I wanted to be a part of my store.”
   
Zane’s business is steadily growing; with quiet pride he tells me how, sitting in the second row at the 2000 Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo, he noticed Hawaiian dignitaries wearing his clothes. His son Kuha‘o, who just finished graphic design school, is joining the company. But Zane plans to remain resolutely local. He still designs his original art, silkscreens and prints the fabric a yard at a time by hand, has his clothes printed and sewn in Honolulu, and sells them only in Hilo, Maui and at sigzane.com. “I’ve kept my business intimate, and hope I can still be intimate in a global sense. I’m confident I can still do what I do on the Web, still tell that story of Hawaiian culture. If we don’t teach about our culture, talk about it, and live it, it’s going to die.”
   
Zane believes that if he can give knowledge of Hawaiian culture to people it will always come back tenfold. Perhaps his most representative design was not done for a shirt or a sheet, but for Kamehameha Schools. In Zane’s “celebrated leaf” design an ‘ulu leaf and the skin of the ‘ulu fruit are laid on each other—symbolizing Hawaii’s will to nurture and educate its children—and are accompanied by an invocation written by Pua Kanahele: “E ulu i ka lani. E ulu i ka honua. E ulu i ka pae ‘aina o Hawai‘i.” “May the heavens increase, may the land grow, and may all parts of Hawai‘i continue to expand.”