Issue Date: June 8, 2003

Tacky or tiki?

Tropical-themed furnishings and apparel, Polynesian martinis and Survivor style conspire to create a warming trend.

By Robin Tunnicliff Reid

After a 30-year slumber, the tiki gods have reawakened. Suddenly, all things Polynesian have taken hold in American pop culture. Furnishings chain Pottery Barn carries bed linens strewn with palm trees, blowing in an imaginary tropical breeze. American Girl dolls sip drinks out of tiki mugs

in the shade of a cabana by day and in tiki torchlight by night (for $105). Hula girl wanna-bes can buy grass skirts in several lengths on the Web at offthedeepend.com as clothes by everyone from high-end designers to the Gap go the tiki route this summer. And then there's 'toon idol SpongeBob SquarePants, who surveys an underwater tropical paradise from his pineapple home on the ocean floor.

Exactly when and why tiki -- a generic word for the stone and wood carvings of Pacific Islanders -- came back is debatable. Maybe "Survivor" voted South Seas culture back onto the island. Or maybe the trend's reappearance was, like all others, inevitable.

"Pop culture likes to recycle itself," says James Teitelbaum, the author of the just-out "Tiki Road Trip: A Guide to Tiki Culture in North America" (Santa Monica Press, $16.95). In it, he maps tiki bars, tiki trailer parks, tiki apartment buildings, tiki bowling alleys. But TV and coconut martinis aren't the only factors fueling a tiki renaissance. It's also about escapism.

After World War II, tiki bars inspired by soldiers returning from the Pacific sprang up in nearly every state. Tiki peaked around the '70s energy crisis, when travel-strapped Americans looked toward the islands to get away, even if only through decor. Television series like Hawaii Five-O -- in which plainclothes police in pressed suits and ties tussled bloodlessly with criminals against a backdrop of blue skies -- were a world away from today's far more grim reality cop shows.

By decade's end, tiki's appeal had faded. "Someone had figured out that the whole thing was rather tacky," Teitelbaum writes in his book.

That's part of tiki's retro appeal today, the author says. Tacky is cool again. Neo-tiki bars from Boston to Modesto are serving up exotic beverages. Add a post-Sept. 11 fear of travel and terrorism, and you can see the appeal of swaying palms and blue skies, he says: "Being on an island with someone bringing you a mai tai is a place a lot of us would rather be now."