Text by Natanya Friedheim
Images by Brandyn Liu
Under the light of a supermoon several years ago, Colleen Kimura, the Hawai‘i textiles designer and founder of local brand Tutuvi, traced the shadow of her front yard’s plumeria tree on her porch steps. She filled the outline it cast with purple paint, creating a permanent silhouette—a floral impression offering a hint of the artwork within her home.
Kimura lives in a classic, single-walled island home nestled against the Moanalua hillside. Outside her living room’s jalousie windows, bright green California grasses, grown long after heavy rains, dance and rustle in the wind. Below the windows, next to racks of aloha shirts, rolls of plain cotton and linen fabric await Kimura’s artistic touch. Tutuvi isn’t restricted to the palms and hibiscuses one would normally spot on ABC Stores aloha wear. Nor does Kimura limit her color choices to the subdued, market-friendly tones of brands like Reyn Spooner.
“It’s part of trying to differentiate myself from what is already out there,” says Kimura, a petite woman of 77, her hair tied up in a neat ponytail and ears adorned with shell earrings cut in the shape of hibiscus flowers. “The least I can do is just try not to repeat what everybody else is doing.”
Instead, her colors and shapes have an almost psychedelic quality. A pattern of purple squids and heliconia blossoms adorns one length of fabric, while a yellow shirt is printed with orange waves, whales, and coral, an ode to the marine national monument Papahānaumokuākea. On another garment, giant red ‘ōhi‘a flowers dwarf a mountainous landscape. Mixing and printing with such vibrant colors, “you feel like, whoa, you’re getting a little drunk or something,” she says, with a laugh.
The day I interview her, Kimura is wearing one of her own Tutuvi shirts: a kukui print featuring not just the recognizable three-pronged leaves but knotted stems of the Hawaiian candlenut tree leaf, woven together to make a lei. Fascinated by the lei’s pattern of knots, she conceived a print “that, if you look closely, you could figure out how to make the lei.” In this way, her design is more instructive than decorative, a convenient tutorial for onlookers.
In 1978, a sense of adventure took Kimura from Mō‘ili‘ili, the urban Honolulu neighborhood where she grew up, to Fiji via the Peace Corps. By then, the 30-year-old was already an experienced artist working in batik, an Indonesian wax-resistant method of dying cloth. Her early work, then under a brand named simply Kimura’s, already showcased a proclivity for the eye-catching. (One notable design was a playful pattern of bacon and eggs.) She spent the next two years teaching Fijian women how to market their traditional crafts, with the intent of building a cottage industry for a sustainable livelihood. When her tenure with the Peace Corps ended, she returned home and relaunched her brand as Tutuvi, the Fijian word for a cloth used to wrap around one’s body, or the act of wrapping oneself in a fabric. She also switched from labor-intensive batik to screen printing, a more commercially efficient method.
Over the following years, customers began asking about the plants in her designs, which made Kimura rethink the intention behind them. “That was different from when I started out,” she says. “There seemed to be an interest in plants that were symbolic and useful to history and culture. As somebody that was born and raised here, that was more meaningful for me too.”
As a result, Kimura’s designs increasingly integrated motifs of Pacific Islander cultures and species endemic to Hawai‘i. Where she previously drew orchids and anthuriums—ornamental plants found in any tropical climate—she began referencing ‘ulu and kalo, staple foods of Samoa and Hawai‘i, respectively. “I call it ‘generic tropical,’” she says of her prior work. “It was reflective of life and climate and colors here, but it wasn’t so specifically of this place.”
Kimura lights a mosquito punk and places it on the floor of her garage-turned-studio, where she screen-prints yards of fabric to be turned into clothing, pillows, table runners, and purses. Dozens of screens made from her hand-drawn designs are stacked like books on a bookshelf. Along the wall are shelves with jars of ink, plastic cups, and an old Zippy’s chili tub repurposed for painting.
In her 20s, Kimura worked out of a studio space near the freeway, sandwiched between her two alma maters, Kaimukī High School and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she studied disciplines such as textile design and ceramics. “We were breathing in all the melted paraffin,” she says, recalling how people in the apartments above her made a fuss about the fumes. She moved into a new space nearby, where the wind coming down from Mānoa Valley would whip around her fabric, still wet with ink. “Your face would be speckled with all these little dots,” she laughs.
On a stretch of fabric large enough to produce 20 pillow covers, Kimura places a screen etched with oblong shapes, each with a small rectangle at their center. She applies a glob of magenta ink thick as pudding and squeegees it down and across, layering the design onto an existing heliconia leaf print. The rectangular pattern, inspired by a photo of a ceremonial shell breastplate in an old Bishop Museum calendar, mimics the museum’s tags used to number artifacts, characteristic of Kimura’s ability to draw inspiration from the mundane. “I sometimes think of the prints as the main feature, and the clothing is there to show off the prints,” she says.
More than four decades later, she uses her library of 50-some-odd screens, their designs ranging from hala trees to ‘ōhi‘a flowers, to create new prints. Over the years, her work has found a home at cultural institutions such as Nā Mea Hawai‘i and the gift shops of the Honolulu Museum of Art and Bishop Museum. In 2024, Pu‘uhonua Society, a nonprofit that supports Hawai‘i-based artists and cultural practitioners, launched a retrospective of her work at Native Books at Arts & Letters, culminating in a private fashion show of Tutuvi prints on garments by local designers Reise Kochi, Aiala Rickard, and Rumi Murakami.
Until recently, she created up to three new prints a year, playing with the limitless color and pattern combinations of her archives: A fern here, a kapa pattern there. In the last year, though, she has taken a small step back from producing new designs to rethink her approach to clothing, saying, “I couldn’t picture myself doing the same thing, the same way, until the end of my career.” Still, the work continues to be a source of inspiration, giving her the same artistic rush with each new print: “It feels like every single one is a brand-new experience.”
