Palm Angels taps Leonardo DiCaprio for its new shirts

There is an item that returns cyclically every summer in the menwear wardrobe: the Hawaiian shirt. Just take a look at the collections proposed during the Milan Men's Fashion Week that recently ended with the understanding that the SS20 will be its season.

From Dolce & Gabbana to Dsquared2, from Marni to Etro, there are lots of brands that have chosen to redesign this iconic garment according to their own style, some in a more Eastern version, some in a more abstract version. The show by Palm Angels attracted the most attention, in particular, that of @diet_prada. Under the corridors of the Porta Venezia underground, Francesco Ragazzi staged his personal vintage American store, a mix'n' match of leather shirts with contrasting utility pockets, outerwear with butterfly prints, tailored evolutions of jogger pants, boxy jackets, basketball vests. The real key piece? The aloha shirts inspired by Romeo+Juliet by Baz Luhrmann. The designer, in fact, has reproduced two of the shirts worn by Leonardo di Caprio in the iconic 1996 film: the one with the flowers on a blue background and the one with a wounded and flaming heart.

Of course, this is not the first time that a brand has proposed an outfit or a garment that has appeared in a movie. Just think of Prada which, for SS14, dressed its models in a shirt already seen on Montgomery Clift in From her to eternity, an unforgettable work of 1953, famous for a long time, to include one of the longest kisses in the history of cinema and to be a great source of inspiration for Hawaiian shirts (there are so many in the scenes). In particular, the one mentioned by Prada is an original produced by Kahanamoku that became popular among collectors as "the death shirt" because Clift sported it in a tragic scene. Cinema, like fashion, has often shown love for aloha shirts, an item born in the 30s as the perfect counterbalance to the button-down from a mix of Hawaiian native traditions, Japanese kimono silks, Filipino dresses and Tahitian prints. Worn in a more casual manner, it almost looked like a t-shirt and thanks to the tiki and surf scenes that Americans loved in the '40s and '50s it became very popular. Back in the cinema, everyone remembers Elvis with his bright floral prints and the ukulele or Al Pacino in Scarface, but also Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro in Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, Robert de Niro in Cape Fear and many others. Although the undisputed king of this style is Tom Selleck in Magnum PI. 

In recent years the Hawaiian shirt has returned to be a trend chosen by luxury brands such as Prada, Saint Laurent or Paul Smith. And now also by Palm Angels. Nothing strange because you know, fashion is cyclical and everything returns to be cool. The question that remains, as suggested by @diet_prada, is whether it's right or wrong for a brand to propose this as its own garment seeing that it has already appeared in a film and when instances like these are tributes or plain copies to hide the lack of original ideas.