With her new Gap collection, Sandy Liang gets a huge new audience

Dainty fashion darling Sandy Liang is bringing her playful, delicate designs to the masses. 

The New York City-based designer, who until now has had a small retail footprint and big fashion clout, is releasing a limited collection with Gap (big footprint, big clout). The collection is anchored by core Gap and Sandy Liang categories, like denim and outerwear, including a precious pair of carpenter jeans with bow stitching on the pocket, a faux fur half zip in a Bambi-inspired print, and two heavy-weight fleece hoodies glamified with the Sandy Liang logo or her signature bow. Baby and toddler styles are also available for the first time. Prices range between $15 and $268.

Prior to today, you could only buy a Sandy Liang piece in two places: on her website, or in her Orchard Street boutique in New York City’s Lower East Side. Now, you can also get the collab pieces on the Gap website, and at select U.S. and global Gap stores (until they sell out).

The collection gives Gap fashion cachet, Liang access to a huge new audience, and the rest of us easier access to Liang’s covetable, girlish pieces—which typically have a pricing floor of several hundred dollars under her own high-end label.

That cachet-by-association is important to Gap because it establishes its authority in the fashion space by targeting a new audience with in-the-know fashion taste. The aim is to win over the tastemakers and conversation starters who later adopters look to for cultural signals, gain cultural relevancy, and then become a driver of cultural conversation itself. 

The Sandy Liang partnership brings “fashion credibility through her lens,” Gap brand president and CEO Mark Breitbard says. And it’s indicative of Gap’s broader partnerships strategy. “What you can see is that we have a reason for each,” Breitbard says, referring to Gap’s recent collaborations. “There is a story behind each. There it’s a real true marriage of their brand and our brand in each, and it’s something that continues to bring energy.” 

Core memories

This collection started with Liang’s mood board of creative inspirations: Nancy Myers, herself as a kid in the ’90s, and phrases like “Gap kids for adults,” and “Gap adults for kids.” All of her designs started from this tensile idea of creating the most serious baby clothes possible, and the silliest, most fun adult clothes ever.

“I really wanted to play with that dynamic of kids things for adults and adult things for kids because when I was a kid going to the Gap stores, so much of that time being in the physical Gap stores was spent fantasizing about what my adult closet would look like, what the adult Sandy would like from this collection,” Liang says. With that lens, she then took some of her favorite Sandy Liang pieces and reinterpreted them for everyday wearability and comfortability in the Gap way. 

Liang describes the collection as one “for your inner child,” which is also a core driver of her own label. She recalls being a student at New York City’s Parsons School of Design, where she says she was taught to find a particular subject and sketch a collection from that. “For me, being instructed to do that just felt so emotionless and not personal,” she says. Instead, the inspiration for her senior thesis came from a capability of the iPhone, which had just come out a few years earlier. Liang recalls scrolling through her iPhone photo albums, which had become an instant and unlimited pool of inspiration.

“I remember being like, ‘why can’t I just reference the moments that I’m finding in life?’” asked Liang, originally from Queens. “Whether it be this Chinatown grandma or my grandma’s blanket or this floral motif I found in this random store. So that’s why personal memories influenced me so much.” And it’s how her brand story originated. 

Bows, stars, and frills: childhood motifs as brand emblems

The Sandy Liang label is known for particular motifs: bows, stars, and rhinestones, girly details that stem from her own childhood doodles. These appear in small, premium garment details in the collection, like star grommets on the jeans and work pants, star zipper pulls, eyelet trim on an athletic black tracksuit, bow stitching on the pockets, and bows on the back of the trench and a navy work trouser. In combination, these design elements create a garment that is “comfortable, sporty, easy, but also just like the slight hit of ‘that was unexpected,’” she says. (See the zip-up hoodie with fur trim, for instance.) 

“The star motif is something that I’ve been doing a lot with my own collection,” says Liang. “Again, it goes back to childhood emblems that I always reference back to. It felt right for Gap, obviously because childhood memories are such a big influence on the collection.” On a practical level, “star” was also the perfect size to put on a ball cap in the classic Gap font.

The recurring bow motif, meanwhile, is “kind of born out of this fascination with princesses and crowns and that sort of thing,” says Liang. “Growing up, I was a bit of a tomboy and I felt insecure to lean more into the pink, girly side. Now that I’m an adult, what I’ve been trying to do is always fulfill my inner child. So I’m doing all the things that I wish I had.”

All her design references come down to core memories and are interpreted through the eyes of childhood. Her interest in the ’90s is because that’s when she was a kid. Rather than referencing it in a literal sense, she references her “memories of what the adults were wearing in the ’90s and what it felt like to be a kid in the ’90s and less so real references,” she says. “It’s more like the energy and feeling.”

The opposite of a trend forecaster

Her consistent use of childhood motifs has led content creators to missassociate her with ephemeral TikTok trends that bubble up over the years, which the chronically online might remember: like “balletcore” and “girlhood.” Who What Wear claimed Liang’s ballet references were one of many to emerge following MiuMiu’s fall/winter 2022 show. Last year, Marie Claire put Sandy Liang’s spring/summer 2024 collection within the popularizing “catch-all of the girlhood aesthetic.”

However this is purely coincidental. The idea of childhood, or girlhood for her, has been driving her brand since it was founded in 2014. Her Mary Jane pointe shoes ended up in a lot of #balletcore roundups, but it had actually been in production for two years prior. That trend may be in the internet’s dustbin, but the shoe is still a core shorthand for Sandy. In fact, you can get it on a Sandy Liang x Gap sweater. 

“I literally am the opposite of a trend forecaster. I’m just trying to find what makes me happy and inspires me, whether it’s a TV show or being a mom right now, or whatever,” she says. “I had no idea what ballet core even meant. That’s just the timing of life.” 

A similar coincidence of timing happened with bows, an internet microtrend which outlets like the Guardian and Harper’s Bazaar say Liang popularized and was associated with balletcore and hashtags like #girlhood. “I just happened to really love bows and satin,” she says.

The conflation “was really funny for me because none of it’s intentional and none of it’s me trying to play a part. Or even being with ‘Girlhood.’ That is something that I identify with, but it’s not a new thing for me. It’s something that’s always driving me, but it’s the thing right now, so people like to associate that. The internet is just so crazy.”

Girlhood forever

Once again, the bow “trend” if there ever was one, is over—but the bow as a core symbol of the Sandy Liang brand lives on. Today, you can find it stitched onto a pocket of Sandy Liang x Gap jeans, and it’s these kinds of recurring visual symbols and related aesthetic tensions of practicality and frivolity and adulthood and girlishness that appeal to Liang’s core customers year over year. And with this release, Liang will likely have many more customers on her hands. 

The Sandy Liang hoodies also show how Gap is improving the quality of its overall product lines. They have a boxy contemporary fit but also a weighty hand feel that led me to inquire about the fleece make itself. The company told me it expanded its fleece assortment last fall to include “heavyweight” (400 grams per square meter) and “extra heavyweight,” (650 grams per square meter) its most premium fleece offerings to date. The Sandy logo hoodie is extra heavyweight, and the bow hoodie is heavyweight, which establishes quality in addition to exclusivity as a limited drop. It will release the classic Arch Logo hoodie in extra heavyweight fleece later this month. 

Collaborations can also create leads for Gap’s core brand: 20% of consumers who made a collab purchase also added a Gap item to their cart, the company told me in September. So just maybe, the fashion set will buy into Gap, too.

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