Post #154366 by bigbrotiki on Fri, Apr 22, 2005 6:55 AM

On 2005-04-20 15:35, johntiki wrote:
Hey Sven, since your brought up the Thor Heyerdahl anniversary... I think it would only be appropriate for you to share some pics of your Kon Tiki aloha shirt! A lot of us have only caught small glimpses of the "world's coolest tiki shirt" in your Tiki Archaeology video and we need to see more! What's the story behind the shirt?

That's easier said than done. For me, getting ANY visual up on TC is a difficult "high tech meets low tech" procedure:
Though I did get a digital camera finally, I have not learned how to operate it yet, because my only computer, a first generation "orange Frisbee" I-book, cannot process the image files. So I have to use my girlfriend's camera (usually at her house), from which the images are transferred onto her home computer. BUT she can't just e-mail them to me, nooo, somehow they do not open when sent from there, she has to send'em to her store machine, to then send'em to me from there! THEN, when I try to upload them on TC, they come out as red x-es and Al (from Alnshelley) has to fix'em for me!

So, forgive me please, maybe someone else here has the Kon-Tiki shirt and can more easily post it, it came out as recently as 1998 or so, from Reyn Spooner. I even have a bath robe from that fabric (which, since it is a little small, I wear like a Japanese Yukata).

And I myself have been curious about it's origin. Though recently manufactured, the pattern MUST be vintage. No late 90s Aloha shirt designer would have gone through the labour of dissecting Thor's books that way:

The images on it are based on:

A.) The covers of "Kon-Tiki" and "Aku Aku", while carefully (obviously for copyright reasons) avoiding the titles and even only hinting at the Kon-Tiki mask on the sail.

B.) What I like even more, the MAPS of the Kon-Tiki voyage, and of Rapa Nui and it's archeological sites, from the end pages of each of both books,

and C.), all the images are seperated by the same lashed bamboo that crosses the pages for the inside title page of "Kon-Tiki" (before the chapter index).

I have written Reyn Spooner to find out if they know anything about the origin of the fabric design, but they never replied, maybe again because of copyright paranoia.

This also seems to have been the concern of the designers of a cool vintage tie I have, which has the Kon-Tiki masks on it, but on the inside has printed in big letters "Aztec Masks" :)

Yes, Thor was a great man. I have two signed copies of his books from friends that saw him speak, and I am most happy to know that before he died, Don Ryan got to show him the Book of Tiki, and he liked it.