4 Asian Americans Show Us How They Styled Sandy Liang From Home

With the rise in hate crimes in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic, this year Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month matters even more. In the middle of these uncertain times, we are reflecting on how this community is core to the fabric of America.

Sandy Liang has been spending her time in quarantine working remotely with her small team and sometimes alone in her studio. “It’s been nice to have more time to design and really think about what I want and what I care about,” she tells Teen Vogue.

The New York City-based designer’s brand has become synonymous with a certain type of fashion person: innately cool, extremely chill, 100% themself. She turns pieces that are traditionally not fashionable into statement pieces: an oversized fleece jacket, a bucket hat, a pair of Vans. And she definitely knows her audience—she recently had a pop-up shop on the very popular Nintendo game, Animal Crossing.

Her clothes resonate with younger people and there’s a reason for that. “Growing up in Queens and being a kid in the 90s and (seeing) what teenagers wore...those sorts of core things never leave you” she says. “You become you when you are an awkward teenager trying to figure yourself out.”

Reconnecting with her teen years, Sandy held her runway show in February at her alma mater Stuyvesant High School. It was a full circle moment for her and gave her collection context, groundedness and a lineage.

“I thought about fashion as a real career when I was in high school,” she says, but she didn’t commit to it as a career until a few years later. After a stint at RISD, she realized architecture wasn’t for her and she didn’t want to be away from home so she transferred to Parsons and pursued a career in fashion.

After Parson’s, Sandy interned for Jason Wu, Richard Chai, Phillip Lim and Opening Ceremony. She said it just so happened she ended up interning for a line-up of Asian designers, “I was never seeking Asian designers, those were just the brands I was really into.”

But it helped for her to see so many successful Asian designers early in her career both because it helped her believe she could do it and also because there were so few women. “Everyone who was big at the time was a guy and I remember feeling like I want to see a woman,” she says.

Sandy doesn’t think too much about how her Chinese American identity informs her work, it’s just a part of who she is. “Being Asian, everything in the brand is infused with that, because the brand is so personal to me,” she says. She also doesn’t like to feel limited by the category of “Asian designer”, “I’ve never tried to let it guide my career or identify me as just that, I’m so much more!” she says.

What made Sandy’s Fall 2020 show so special was not just the excitement of watching a designer go back to where it all began, but the several young Asian teens donning her clothes, styled to their own liking filling the corridors of the school. She had clearly become a role model for a new generation of kids that didn’t always see themselves in fashion.

For AAPIHM, we wanted to recreate the feeling of comfort home can evoke while grappling with this pandemic and the hate that has come with it. So, we talked with four Asian American young people about their life in quarantine, sent them an article of Sandy’s clothing, and photographed them outside of their homes.