This is going to get weird
Let me explain.
When I was sorting through my clothes before moving two years ago, I found an old bowling shirt I used to wear in high school. It was a gift from a friend who got it from her dad. At the time, it was cool—ironic, vintage, unique. I wore it until sometime in college when I saw someone wearing a bowling shirt and one of those visors with fake hair on it.
Squeezing myself back into the shirt, I wondered where the design came from, and why it stopped being cool. So I started researching. The research led to this short article for Smithsonian magazine.
But this wasn’t the end of my interest. Reporting the piece left me with dozens of documents and pages of notes that center around ideas I write about here—nostalgia, history, popular culture. What follows is essentially a version of my notes. I’m going to spread this out over three installments. Don’t worry—each piece works on its own as something to read, so don’t feel like you’re committing to every installment by reading this one.
The Uniform of Space-Age Bachelor Pad Exotica
Guy Fieri doesn’t own a bowling shirt.
Interviewing the TV chef forThe Wall Street Journal in 2024, Lane Florsheim asked Fieri outright how many of the garments he has. “I don’t think I even own one,” Fieri said. Fieri has also distanced himself from the flame-patterned bowling-style shirt that he’s been long-associated with, saying it was the uniform at one of his restaurants, not a personal fashion choice. When you look at the picture of Fieri in the shirt, there’s a clear insignia for his restaurant Johnny Garlic’s on the right breast.
In terms of gossip tonnage for interview bombshells, Fieri’s comment on the bowling shirt barely ranks. But it’s interesting that the Wall Street Journal asked him about this particular item. And this was the second mention of bowling shirts in the piece. The lede describes Fieri as an "Emmy-nominated host and restaurateur [who] has established himself as a greasy-spoon connoisseur with a wardrobe full of bowling shirts and a crown of frosted tips.”
The bowling shirt’s image is so firmly associated with hot-rod dad culture that when high-end designers put bowling-inspired garments in their lineups a few years ago,Vogue suggested careful styling to avoid “looking like someone’s creepy uncle.”
Thirty years ago, a bowling shirt was a signifier of an obsession with kitsch or an addiction to irony. The vintage-shop owner played by John Waters in a 1997 Simpsons episode wears multiple bowling shirts. Ethan Hawke’s character wears one in Reality Bites. In less than a decade, the bowling shirt changed from the uniform of alt hipsterdom to the button-up equivalent of a bleached-blond soul patch. A Flair Hair visor for the torso. Now its image is something like Fieri—derided in some corners for absurdity and tastelessness and appreciated in others for earnestness. It’s simultaneously steeped in irony but too sincere to dismiss as frivolous. Fieri’s influence on the shirt’s image is notable, but it’s just one part of a decades-long nostalgia cycle that has left the shirt a little more faded with each turn.
Three Precursors to the Bowling Shirt
There’s a long history of clothes with origins in athletics becoming everyday wear: polo shirts; sport coats; tennis shoes; baseball caps; and most recently joggers (pants with elastic waists and cuffs—basically a way to wear sweatpants in public, heaven help us). While that’s certainly the case with the name of the bowling shirt, it’s not so clear that the shirt itself was designed for the sport.
Generally defined, a bowling shirt fits a few criteria:
* Short sleeves
* Button-front
* Open collar
* Full, boxy cut
* Squared hem
These criteria weren’t unique to the bowling shirt. In the middle of the twentieth century, before anything was called a “bowling shirt,” there were three other garments with a similar design in men’s wardrobes.
First was the camp shirt. These took off in the ‘30s as casual warm-weather shirts intended for camping or other outdoor activities in a time when wearing just a t-shirt would be like going out in underwear. In its cut and khaki color, the camp shirt is similar to military uniforms (the armed services, like sports, are a major influence on clothing design).
Next is the Guayabera shirt, a lightweight camp-collar design notable for having four pockets in the front (two at the breast, two at the hip) and pleats. The shirt is most closely associated with Cuba, though there’s some debate over whether it might have originated in the Philippines and spread between Spanish colonies. Short-sleeved versions of this shirt became common under various names in the U.S. As a kid shopping in thrift stores, I knew them as “barber shirts,” presumably because the pockets were handy for holding combs or scissors. And indeed, here’s a photo of barbers in the ‘40s in Wisconsin wearing what look like variations on the basic design.
The other type of shirt with these features that grew in popularity in the ‘30s was the Aloha shirt—likely first made in Hawai’i using colorful cloth imported from Asia. This shirt spread to the U.S. in droves as servicemen returned from duty in the South Pacific and as Hawai’i became a tourist destination for Americans who were getting rich in the post-war boom years.
The Bowling Boom
Tropical travel was just one way to spend the excess time and money many Americans had in the postwar years. Bowling was another. The sport grew in popularity in the late ‘40s, and exploded in the 1950s with the invention of automatic pinsetters, which made the game faster and more convenient. Bowling was popular on early television, which only drove more Americans to the lanes themselves. Bowling alleys were staple amenities in the growing American suburbs. The American Planning Association estimated that 20,000 new lanes opened across the U.S. in the first twelve years after the end of the war. Some alleys offered child care so stay-at-home moms could compete in leagues during the day. By 1960, the New York Times was reporting that bowling rivaled baseball in popularity.
In the same article, the Times reported on the launch of a new line of clothing from the bowling company Brunswick that was “a far cry from the utilitarian shirt-and-pants-look so long associated with bowling.” As bowling spread, it wasn’t always clear what one would wear to participate in the nation’s new pastime. Pre-war illustrations show men and women in the traditional garments of the time—shirts and ties, dresses or skirts with blouses.
As dress codes relaxed after the war, bowlers went to the alley in the shirts they wore for leisure, and clothing manufacturers tried to cash in on the trend. They made boxier shirts in long and short sleeves, some with collars that would hold a man’s necktie. Over time, as dress codes kept relaxing and as the AC kept blasting in bowling alleys, these designs evolved into the bowling shirt we know today—close cousin to the camp, Aloha, and Guayabera.
But that’s just the shape of the shirt. The bowling shirt has other features that set it off from a standard camp shirt—color-block stripes, contrast piping…some even had epaulets. These were practical adjustments. Bowling shirts were athletic uniforms. Most bowling was done in leagues, where teams needed to match each other. They also needed to match their surroundings. With robotic machines setting pins and a mass culture obsessed with splitting atom and the space race, many new bowling alleys took on what we now think of as a classic ‘50s architectural style—usually called Googie, after a diner that demonstrated this style.
It’s a distinctly American look. It’s the kitschy, futuristic contemporary to the more European-inspired midcentury modern. But while Googie aspires to space and jets, it’s modeled on trains and built for cars. The chrome and tile diners that embody Googie evolved from train cafe cars. And the neon lights and swooping boomerang awnings were meant to draw in passing motorists.
Bowling alleys were social hubs. The American Planning Association called them “the poor man’s country club,” and implied this nickname was commonly used at the time. Alleys not only had lanes, they had lounges and restaurants. A driver passing by didn’t need to be in a league to stop in and have some fun. For those who did compete, the new bowling shirts were loose enough to wear during competition, but styled to be chic during a post-game cocktail at the alley bar.
Briefly: Short Sleeves for Everyone
Throughout the ‘50s, many men had taken to wearing what were called sport shirts. These were slightly more casual versions of dress shirts, usually distinguished by their louder patterns or softer details and fabrics (some traditional menswear stores list Oxford shirts among the sports shirts). The growing counterculture in the ‘50s and ‘60s loosened fashion rules for everyone. In 1966, in an effort to promote the Aloha shirt, an industry group celebrated “Aloha Friday.” Soon, offices across the U.S. let their workers leave the ties at home under the day’s new name, Causal Friday.
The Aesthetic of an Ethos
If you’re imagining a soundtrack to the late ‘50s bowling bonanza, you might be thinking of rock and roll. It’s the music associated with the Googie diners and drive-ins. But adults in the ‘50s were too old for Elvis. They went for jazz. And among the newly moneyed leisure class, there was a new type of jazz to enjoy—exotica.
Exotica is hard to describe, but you know it when you hear it, or when you see it. It’s a little like the bowling shirt—a blend of cultural influences shaped for the comfort of white middle class Americans. It evokes the South Pacific and the Caribbean while borrowing heavily from Latin Jazz. The records in this genre sometimes included animal sounds among the beats. The covers featured sexy women dressed to look “exotic”—that is, foreign. It’s music for young people who just got back from the war, who have disposable income, and are living in America at a time of empirical expansion. The music went well with the Tiki craze of the ‘50s.
The scholar Phil Ford describes exotica as not just music, but an entire aesthetic designed for “The technologized suburbanite who is permitted to spy on native rites.” Ford goes on to describe this listener by quoting Hugh Hefner’s writing in the first issue of Playboy. “We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”
Exotica was often lumped in with lounge music, the type played by Esquivel. At its best, the music is innovative, taking advantage of stereo recordings and new techniques in mixing. It’s truly space-age. At its worst, the music sounds like easy listening in a cheap satin dinner jacket—pretensious but hollow.
The “technologized suburbanite” might be mixing martinis in silver shakers or going out for a Mai Tai served in a cup shaped like a Pacific Island statue. He bowled in leagues. He drove a car with fins. He lived a new type of lifestyle. The future was his.
Next time…the last decade of the future.
