Dollhouse Dreams: Sandy Liang FW25 Collection
By: Haerin Kim
Women strut down the runway in whimsical uniforms of your childhood doll: creamsicle colored sweaters over metallic and vinyl skirts coated in jewel tones or emanating embellished sheens, or patterned leggings and strapped sandals of an especially chic child at daycare. Drawing inspiration from stationery and toys of prepubescent fixation, each garment evokes nostalgic visual parallels and fixates your gaze like the candies at supermarket checkouts when you clung to your mother’s skirt.
Images from Sandy Liang
Some of the show stopping ready-to-wear pieces are the How to Fold a Paper Star skirt, a carousel of step-by-step photographic origami instructions for wishful thinkers; clasped vinyl planner sleeves, scaled and converted into side-fastened skirts; Polly Pocket skirts, with miniature objects visible through a star-shaped window sewn directly onto the skirt.
Each reiteration of girlhood is completed with grapelike faux pearls beaded over-the-collar, their utter disregard for subtlety or modesty culminating in the small schoolgirl rebellion of New York-based designer Sandy Liang. Liang launched her eponymous label in 2014, her designs inspired by her family’s restaurant in Chinatown, her grandmother, and, as demonstrated in her Fall/Winter 2025 collection, the nostalgic sensibilities of her childhood. With an instantly recognizable design language drawing on halcyon motifs of juvenility such as bows, petals, pointelle, and scalloped, Liang’s collection crafts a world of an imagined innocence where our sensible adult perspectives and propriety are dethroned.
Images from Sandy Liang
Liang’s most audacious collection yet, this is an imagined childhood of play and expression one conceived as a child–and perhaps an imagined narrative one still yearns to claim retrospectively as a jaded adult. Through Liang’s collection, we heal thwarted desires of girlhood, bound by expectations for conformity, austerity, or humility, while reminding ourselves that youth is a matter of mind and fashioning oneself rather than a transitional and now obsolete state of being.
In her Downtown workshop, Liang’s team ingeniously sews together conceptual and formal signatures of iconic collections: the camp vivaciousness of Jeremy Scott’s Moschino, codified femininity and costume accessorizing of Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel, and naivety redefined by the emancipated woman as seen in Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu. However, rekindling an exuberance that is subdued or understated in much of contemporary high fashion, with mid-range luxury pricing and her Lower East Side flagship’s playground charm, Liang’s collection possesses a democratic power and humour that invites participation and play.