When Rizzoli first approached designer Sandy Liang to make a coffee table book, the downtown darling admitted the project was never one she would have had enough “rizz” to propose on her own. The prospect of a book, uneditable once on shelves, presented an overwhelming feeling of finality compared to the ever-evolving, ephemeral language of fashion design. Tweaks can be made between the runway and the rack. Have an itch to reinvent your own archival silhouette? There’s always next season. “I’m one of those people who feels like the job is never done,” says Liang, while flipping through the book’s pages in her Lower East Side studio for the very first time. However, one nagging sentiment prompted the designer to put it all on the page: Liang has never kept an official archive, and so, Dressing Up, a hand-annotated diary of a decade of memories, was born.
Despite her studio being stickered with photos, sprinkled with tchotchkes, and stuffed to the brim with fabric samples, clothing racks, and sewing machines—you name it—the Sandy Liang archive, in the most concrete sense of the term, is pretty much nonexistent. There’s no printed and bound catalogue of first look polaroids from each runway show, nor is there a single temperature-controlled storage unit housing all of the greatest hits, and innumerable old sketches have either been thrown out or lost to time. In the designer’s own words: “It’s a freaking mess.” But it’s a “mess” that this project has prompted Liang to shape anew.
The book-making process, much like Liang’s own designs, began with a fond childhood memory: scrapbooking. “I love scrapbooking, and I feel like I’m such a memory collector and hoarder,” she says somewhat ironically—it’s mostly the formal organization that’s lacking. Liang began by foraging through thousands upon thousands of photos on her iPhone: backstage snapshots and e-commerce photos interspersed with her own life milestones, including her engagement, wedding, and the birth of her child. Such a melange of images, each paired with a first-person footnote chronicling everything from her first Monchhichi doll to the original inspiration for the Sandy Liang ballet flat, is reflected in a freewheeling stream of consciousness rendered on the page.
The lo-fi format evokes a girlish nostalgia, an emotion that is present in plenty of the designer’s childhood-inspired collections, but is also one that has only intensified during her urge to preserve these memories as a mother. “I feel like a book is such a time capsule, and that’s what’s so fascinating to me about it,” says Liang. This nostalgia is apparent to the brand’s family as well. W Youth Magazine’s Ava Niuri conducted the in-book interview with Liang, and actress and close friend Greta Lee penned the introductory letter. “We met at a moment when I was grasping at what it would possibly mean to be a young woman, still blossoming and still becoming,” wrote Lee. “I love Sandy—always have and always will,” she adds via email.
