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.
