Chi Chi Tiki Bar Restaurant Vintage Advertising Art Unisex Shirt

Originally a Palm Springs restaurant called The Desert Grill, Chi Chi was opened in 1941 and reimagined as a tropical-themed nightclub catering to the Hollywood elite. theconcept grew into a chain of ?supper clubs? ?one-stop destinations that offered multiple rooms of entertainment, food, live music, and dancing. Ultimately, there were seven locations throughout California, including Palm Springs, Catalina Island, Hollywood, Riverside, Belmont Shore in Long Beach, and San Diego. the clubs were usually advertised with renderings of a topless Polynesian beauty, aptly nicknamed the ?Chi Chi Girl and which appeared on everything from napkins to menus to newspaper advertisements. The image on this shirt is taken from an old matchbook and does not carry the detail of the black velvet Chi Chi girl painting that graced the venues, but it is a nicely rendered and redrawn representation of the simple flat color versions of the Chi Chi girl that often were found on that sort of ephemera. Scanned, redrawn and redesigned slightly to look good on a shirt, this Chi Chi design is free of many of the artifacts and poor reproduction often scene with this sort of reproduction. Printed direct-to-garment using water-based inks on a 100% cotton shirt.