Sandy Liang Looks Back at the Girlhood That Inspired Her Brand
With her new book Dressing Up, the designer turns ten years of runway images, personal snapshots, and her teen magazine obsessions into one very personal scrapbook.
Before Sandy Liang built an entire visual language out of the sartorial trappings of girlhood—like the bows, Peter Pan collars, ballet flats and pleated skirts that grace her runway collections—she was just a girl herself, flipping through a stack of her friend’s older sister’s magazines at a sleepover.
"I grew up totally consuming Seventeen and YM," Liang tells WYouth editor Ava Nirui, a contributor to Dressing Up: Sandy Liang, the new Rizzoli book cataloging the designer’s rise. "We would read all the quizzes and the crazy stories and get so excited to grow up."
“It felt like these magazines held the key to our destinies, like we were going to learn how to be cool and sexy,” she adds with a laugh. They “totally impacted the way I thought adult life was going to be."
That influence runs through everything Liang has made creatively since, gathered in Dressing Up as a visual exploration of her and the brand’s archive. The book captures the label's past decade by piecing together runway shots, backstage film photos, e-commerce images she shot herself, and the contents of her camera roll into 276 pages she describes as a scrapbook.
Rizzoli approached Liang around the brand's tenth anniversary in 2024, and her first instinct was that she hadn't done enough to warrant a book. "I'm not ready yet. Like, I haven't really done anything," she remembers thinking. "I'm still trying to make it work. I haven't had anything quote-unquote figured out, so therefore I don't deserve a book." But gathering the materials for the project, diving deep into the ephemera of her brand, personal life, and the consistent overlap between the two, let her look back in a way that made her feel both grateful and proud.
“I'm obsessed with all the earlier stuff” captured in the book, she says, “because that was when I was working so blind. I had no idea what was going to happen, and I was extremely scrappy.” The process took two months, and Liang had to make a spreadsheet to track her old collections chronologically. “It’s nice to see that undistilled form of the brand,” she says, “when I was trying so hard to make it work, when I was living, eating, everything for the brand.”
Photos from her engagement, wedding, pregnancy, and with her family made the book, too. "It's never like my personal life is here, and then my work life is here," she says. "They're always talking to each other. They're one and the same."
For readers, she hopes to remind them “of how happy they were when they were kids, how limitless their imaginations were, how carefree they felt." And for herself, looking through the archive gave her the chance to get inspired by her own work. “I feel like I'm old enough now where I can reference my own pieces from previous collections," she says. “Looking through all the old photos, I'm like, ‘Wait, that was really cute, but that fit could have been improved. Let's bring it back and redo it.’"
Dressing Up: Sandy Liang ($65) is out September 22 by Rizzoli. Below, a look inside.
Models backstage at the fall/winter 2023 Sandy Liang show.
A shot from the FW22/R23 lookbook, one of Liang’s “favorite lookbook shoots ever.” She writes: “A lot of the details and silhouettes from this collection became perennial for me, like the rosette, sexy tailoring (or sexy for me at least), slim sweaters, pleated trains, and elongated bows.”
A model backstage at fall/winter 2024. “This collection was about a regal princess whose outfit wasn’t about the frills and ruffles, but about tailoring and office-feminine silhouettes,” Liang writes in the book. References for the collection included paparazzi photos of Japanese princesses and Annie James’s tweed set from The Parent Trap.
Models shot by Liang. “My love for uniforms went into overdrive during my honeymoon in Japan,” she writes. “There is something so satisfying and compelling about a group of girls wearing outfits of the same code. Our Pilot pinafore is my dream combo of an apron meets pleats, meant for every day but also feels like playing dress-up.”
A model wearing the “Peach” dress from Liang’s made-to-order 2022 bridal collection.
Liang backstage at her spring/summer 2023 show.
An image from Liang’s spring/summer 2015 lookbook taken in front of 190 Bowery, one of her “favorite buildings of all time.” Liang’s grandparents lived down the street, where she would sometimes sleep over as a child. “I remember feeling so in awe of this massive building, which didn’t really change until I was an adult,” she writes.
A model with tiny satin bows in her hair for the fall/winter 2023 show. Liang would later do the same style for her Maine wedding.
Liang in her studio.
