Sandy Liang is a kid of the internet. She has a spidey sense of what’s coming up — like the normative fleece jackets popular a few years back or the current ballet-influenced TikTok trend — and quickly delivers cutesy-alternative versions before the trend cycles into the mainstream.
For fall, Liang mixed some of those ballet references with late 19th-century debutante dress shapes and early 2000s-type low-rise silhouettes. Liang, a child of the Lower East Side, also likes to mix in references of her youth — late-’90s pop stars and dress-up box clothes — with the current savoir she observes from her shop windows on Orchard Street.
This season, that oftentimes translated to Sailor Moon as seen through a downtown lens, like pinafore dresses with drop-waist pleated skirts and puff-sleeved crinoline minis with sashes draped across the bias. In between she delivered low-rise pants and miniskirts paired with cropped cardigan twinsets — sometimes embellishing her models’ navels with rhinestones.
Liang always susses out some irony in what’s overtly saccharine and so there were bows, satin rosettes, leg warmers and silken ballet flats with a stubbed toe like those real dancers use to spin en pointe (she started selling these last season).
For Liang, it was a message about the versatility of a dress. “It’s about the dress as the uniform, you are wearing the dress to do whatever you need to do and there’s one for each occasion — whether it be daily life or for going out,” she said.