This story is taken from the spring 2024 issue of Dazed. Order a copy of the magazine here.
“This is me if you even care,” the neat white Sans Serif text, contained within Instagram’s signature 1080×1080-pixel square block, declared. Just underneath was a big, juicy, vinegar-dripping green gherkin, and around its middle, a pale, powderpuff-pink satin ribbon tied tightly in a skew-whiff bow. As they so often do, the rudimentary but effective meme quickly went viral across social media at the end of December, with a tidal wave of similar, silly images also taking over TikTok and Pinterest (and likely, group chats everywhere) in the days that followed.
Though bows had been bubbling up for a while under the guise of yet another core-affixed trend dubbed coquette, the end of last year saw them reach a fever pitch. “The great bow-pocalypse of 2023,” was the title being thrown around in the comments, and buzzy New York designer. Sandy Liang was its crowned queen. “I was being sent memes constantly right before the holidays,” she laughs over Zoom, dialling in from her dreamy, chock-a-block studio, located in the windowless basement of a storage space owned by her dad. Her dog, a mini Australian Shepherd named Tim Tam, is napping just out of shot. “My favourite one was a car wrapped in a bow, and when you zoomed out, it had a huge dent in it. Like, ‘It’s OK! Just put a bow on it!”
Beyond dented cars, when people weren’t trussing themselves up in lengths of satin and gingham cotton, they were affixing ribbons to unsuspecting pets, berserk household objects, and largely, food. Hotdogs, bowls of pasta, and even ice cubes couldn’t escape. Packets of Sertraline, too. Toilet handles and lighters and iPhones with break-up texts plastered across their screens didn’t fare any better, and I even saw, with my own eyes, a member of staff wind tiny black bows around the stems of a tower of wine glasses ahead of a screening of Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla – but then, what else?
In a kind of chicken-or-egg situation, trying to decipher whether Liang was the catalyst for the coquette movement that’s still burning bright across fashion, or her flippy schoolgirl skirts, sailor smocks and ballet pumps just fuelled the fire is pretty tricky. But when it comes to the conversation that surrounds the trend, it’s Liang’s name that’s on everybody’s lips. The designer’s bows may have taken over New York City, and beyond that, the world, moving out of niche fashion circles and into mainstream consciousness in the last year or so, but it’s not the first time she’s been the brains behind a cult fashion item – in fact, conjuring up hyped pieces seems to come naturally to her.
After switching architecture for fashion design and graduating from Parsons, she founded her eponymous label in 2014. As Sandy Liang was finding its feet, she debuted a series of cosy, and actually surprisingly functional fleeces, which I first spotted in 2018 in a tiny concept store on LA’s chichi Abbot Kinney Boulevard. One spoke to me: so far beyond anything I would usually ever wear, it came in a fleshy shade of peachy nude with contrasting animal print pockets and clashing trims, and was the piece I never knew I needed. Soon, it was on heavy rotation within my wardrobe, and came with what felt like the keys to an if-you-know-you-know fashion club. It felt, even then, like Liang was on the verge of something big.
In the ten years since she started out, Liang has amassed a dedicated following around the world, bolstered by the fact she’s found fans in some pretty big names: namely Rosalía, Bella Hadid and BlackPink’s Jennie Kim, who have all slipped into her patent Mary-Janes and big, blousy scrunchies. In certain areas of New York, you’re never more than a few feet away from a fashion fan decked out in Sandy Liang, or so the rumour goes. “The feeling of seeing people [in my clothes] out in the wild never changes,” she says. “It’s always just like ‘Oh my God, is that for real?’ It’s the best feeling ever when you don’t know the person, there’s no association, no discount – they’ve spent their hard-earned money on something I dreamt up and created. It’s like the ultimate goal.”
Looking at Liang’s collections, it probably won’t come as a surprise that Sofia Coppola’s work is never far from her mind. “My favourite movie is [Coppola’s] Marie Antoinette,” she reveals. “It’s just such a beautiful, sweet and sad movie. I’ve seen it so many times, but I never get tired of it. I actually just went to a screening of it the other day.” She first watched it in her teens, and now finds it interesting that a whole new generation of young women are seeing it for the first time, finding inspiration in its obscene baroque opulence meets Y2K-era aesthetic. Much has been made of fashion and wider culture’s current obsession with girlhood, but Liang distils it down to something very simple. “That look is something I’ve always gravitated towards,” she explains. “I’ve always been a very nostalgic person and it’s a yearning for that time, I guess. The dreamy, soft-focus part of your youth.” In the adolescent rush to seem older and more sophisticated, this lean into girlhood later on feels like a second chance at embracing its softness.
Rather than try to cultivate or tap into a trend to sell clothes, Liang has always been more about creating a community within fashion, and “maybe selfishly” turning out only what she wants to wear. Where endless ‘what’s in and what’s out for 2024’ lists rolled out in the hazy days of the new year pointed to a death knell for coquette-core, and more specifically – and, at times, vehemently – bows, the designer intends to keep doing what she’s doing. Somewhere out there there’s always going to be someone who wants to look like a Lisbon sister or as if they just stepped off the set of a Lana Del Rey video shoot, after all. “I find it kind of sad when people say I’m trying to be part of this trend, when actually it’s like, ‘No, I never got over it,’” she laughs. “It was never trendy for me, so it’s never going to stop being trendy for me, you know?” Also on her mood boards, both stored away in folders inside her phone and plastered across the walls of her studio, are all manner of school uniforms, photos of works by artists like Degas, and elderly Chinese grannies out running their errands in the rain.
“I’ve always been a very nostalgic person and it’s a yearning for that time, I guess. The dreamy, soft-focus part of your youth” – Sandy Liang
There’s magic beyond the clothes, though. A massive part of what has made Liang’s label so successful is how connected she feels to the people who wear her pieces. “I think that partly comes from how immersed in the brand I am,” she says. “For the longest time, it was just me. I’d be taking the photos for the website, doing all the creative alongside all the business stuff. People think because they’re seeing your stuff everywhere, there’s a big team behind closed doors. But there’s just me and a handful of other people even now.” Though she’ll soon clear half a million followers on Instagram, the designer still uses her account like it’s totally personal, posting selfies, Sunday afternoon Studio Ghibli marathons, and cute stuff she sees on the subway on her way to work.
Recent uploads include a snap of Kiki’s Delivery Service, a mirror shot of her wearing a cherry red smock dress, a photo captured in her poster-strewn childhood bedroom with ‘paw-paw’, and a doormat with a naff, Live, Laugh, Love-esque slogan that hammers home the Sandy Liang message – “I’m going to be my own kind of princess” – taken from her recent homeware range, which (shock!) completely sold out just about immediately. Right at the start, she’d answer DMs and have conversations with the people who loved her clothes, and even though she doesn’t have time to nowadays, these foundations are probably the reason Sandy Liang feels so authentic now it’s blown up. The internet, as we all know, can be a cruel, hostile place, with the Instagram comments section a wild west-like space awash with trolls, but Liang’s community barely stops with the slays and the queens and the yes besties as they beg the designer to drop sold-out looks and reissue faves from the archives.
The camaraderie of the comments spills over into real life at Liang’s near-mythical sample sales. Sure, it still gets cutthroat inside, with a New York friend recounting the moment she saw two girls near-wrestling over a pair of inky blue pumps at the last one, but beyond fights over discounted pieces, friendships are formed between like-minded, bow-festooned people in the queues that snake around the block. “What I love most [about this whole movement] is that you don’t even have to have the money,” Liang says. “As long as you have a bit of ribbon, you can tie a bow and make yourself feel a bit better. You can be part of it.” Where sample sales were once the kind of thing to be endured on the hunt for a bargain – get in, get your stuff and get out – now they’re a social occasion in themselves. Even if you don’t have the cash to splash, you can line up, make friends, snap a mirror selfie for the ’gram or film your ‘Come to the Sandy Liang sale’ video for TikTok. If Sofia Coppola were to conjure up a sample sale in a forthcoming film, they’d surely look just like this.
There’s a lot to be said about the current state of fashion, with a huge swathe of the industry’s top spots dominated by men designing for women. Even the AW24 season gave us a lot to unpack when it comes to why designers like John Galliano and Marc Jacobs are intent on dressing women like stiff little dollies right now. But as a woman designing for women, there is such a thrill to be found in Sandy Liang’s unashamedly, outrageously feminine clothes, each scalloped hem or pearl-beaded trim reading like a love letter to girlhood and the magic it holds, whatever your age. “At the end of the day, I’m just a girl, designing for other girls,” Liang surmises. “There’s no ‘dream’ Sandy Liang girl. It’s whoever they want to be.”