7 min learnDriving up Fifth Avenue to the New York Academy of Drugs on the Sunday of New York Trend Week, it was simple to really feel such as you had been entering into one other world totally. On the sidewalks approaching 103rd Avenue, individuals carrying February’s traditional uniform of chunky coats and even chunkier boots had been shortly changed by these in little pink minidresses, candy lacy collars, and a medley of bows. The massive blur of playful femininity and blushed cheeks might imply just one factor: the Sandy Liang present was about to start.
The Trend Week schedule is at all times packed, however each season, there are a couple of reveals the place company strive their highest to linger, to decelerate and take in the ambiance. They’re those with a neighborhood so robust it pulls you in, the place individuals let down their guard and permit themselves to be unabashedly joyful. They’re those that attendees have marked of their diaries with a coronary heart, counting down the times to the 15-minute presentation. They’re those with cult followings, whose flurry of company and onlookers alike may be noticed on the prepare journey there. In New York, these are Anna Sui and Sandy Liang.
“It appears like we’re enjoying costume up,” Ella Emhoff instructed Harper’s Bazaar on “Sandy Sunday,” because the company known as it. She was carrying a blue checkered set, together with a white tee crafted with an lovable built-in patterned bra. “We’re all so excited to dress and come right here.”
Whereas Liang counts a number of recognizable stars as followers—Emhoff, alongside the likes of Olivia Rodrigo and Lola Tung—its entrance row wasn’t stacked with high-profile influencers or celebrities there for the sake of a viral press alternative. As a substitute, the historic library was packed full with a mixture of writers and editors, artists and designers, and mates of the model. The company all stalled to seek out their seats, reuniting with mates on the town for the week and greeting new faces with the identical enthusiasm. (Whenever you’re a Sandy lady, each different Sandy lady appears like a long-lost cousin.) It was all giddy smiles and childlike marvel, with followers able to dive in and obsess over the brand new assortment.
Since its basis in 2014, the model has discovered its footing with the dreamers, nostalgics, and daring girly women of New York Metropolis who want a spot to indulge of their fantasies. Whether or not turning to dollhouses for coquette-core inspiration or referencing particular childhood recollections of her personal (comparable to The Recent Prince of Bel Air), Liang has tugged at her followers’ heartstrings by referencing their interior worlds—the place childlike imaginations stay on and the often-trivialized experiences of girlhood should not solely valued, however contemplated.
That was notably clear this season, which welcomed company for a group impressed by the muse of all muses: Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola’s model). Should you haven’t seen the movie, it made the fantastical world of Versailles right into a bubblegum Y2K playground whereas on the similar time humanizing the queen as a younger lady navigating an unfamiliar land and title. This dichotomy—of over-the-top pastry-colored daydreams and actual politically charged discussions—has lengthy been a Liang touchstone, and hit notably near residence for her followers who stability the 2 sides of themselves (the romantic and the realist) in on a regular basis life.
“Everybody will get so excited, posting about their Sandy fittings and being like, ‘That is my favourite day of style week,’” Emhoff continued. “My historical past with Sandy goes again to this point, however I might say, the primary time I encountered her was most likely on Instagram seven years in the past, earlier than I used to be doing something within the style trade. It felt simply so nostalgic, blended with the present lady you need to be; you’re nearly rising up with the model. It creates a neighborhood that’s tremendous particular to individuals who resonate with this sort of nostalgia and playful. I believe the fantastic thing about it’s that it’s not for everybody, however the individuals it’s, it hits so near residence.”
Ella Emhoff
Lumia Nocito
For Kayla Curtis-Evans, inventive editor at Hypebeast, it actually did. “After I was youthful, I daydreamed so much; I nonetheless do,” she shared. “Typically I really feel like my head is within the clouds most of the time. Once we become old, we’re taught to discard that dream-like state and decide into actuality—however Sandy Liang’s reveals create a universe the place it’s okay to dream, to take pleasure in your interior youngster, regardless of how previous we get.”
However whereas daydreaming is a solo exercise, Liang’s reveals are communal. “There’s one thing so comforting about sitting in a room with likeminded individuals, watching clothes created by a designer with a like-minded lifestyle,” Curtis-Evans goes on. “Sandy’s collections inform us which you could’t outgrow whimsy, and I believe we might all use a little bit extra whimsy nowadays.”
Brooke Frischer, affiliate editor at Fashionista, has returned to Liang season after season. She instructed an analogous story. “Even though I’ve been overlaying Sandy Liang’s reveals for a few years, the childlike pleasure I get out of attending her reveals by no means fades—not even a little bit bit,” she famous. “There’s an intense delight I get out of watching Liang’s collections of fantastical, dreamy designs that tug at a youthful model of myself.”
“I used to be by no means eager to current as a ‘girly’ youngster for causes which can be doubtless typically rooted within the patriarchy, and in some ways, Liang’s work gave my interior youngster the secure area to precise that girlish facet of me as an grownup. I believe quite a lot of the individuals I see each season at her reveals share an analogous sense of gratitude for the world she’s created.”
Alyssa Coscarelli
Sydney Lynn Carlson
It’s secure to say that if the (dramatized) French queen had been a Gen Z style darling, she’d be locally, dressed head to toe in Liang. The place Coppola’s Y2K model paired ballgowns with Converse, Liang’s would put on a bow-covered minidress, a pair of bunny heels, and maybe a sweatshirt from the Hole collaboration if she was feeling extra informal. Or, maybe, she would slip right into a plaid miniskirt, à la Christy Lee, who graced the entrance row alongside her boyfriend, Publish Malone.
The artist himself, however, proved that you simply don’t need to put on the garments to like the world they belong in. He was representing the label as finest he might by carrying its “Toy Tee”—a colourful play on the Toys R Us brand. “That is the one factor I can match into,” he mentioned. “I can’t put on any of it, but it surely’s cute, I adore it.” Maybe this ought to be an indication that Liang ought to enterprise into menswear.
On the Anna Sui present the day earlier than, the neighborhood was simply as close-knit—however multigenerational.
“I’m such the quintessential ‘Anna Sui lady,’” Karen Elson instructed Harper’s Bazaar inside Gramercy Park’s intimate and cozy, but unique Nationwide Arts Membership. The dark-academia setting, with its 125-year historical past, stained-glass home windows, and art-covered wood partitions, felt made for the event. Friends wearing earth-tone prints, retro plaids, loud furs, and funky boots mirrored the room’s mix of wealthy supplies and historic curiosities. Elson, for one, embraced a number of of those ideas, with a tan velvet coat trimmed with leopard-print fur and chunky black platforms.
Karen Elson and Anna Sui
“Anna simply represents the downtown cool lady, the lady who used to go to the flea market to discover a classic costume and a pretend fur coat and make it into one thing magic. Anna has that magic,” the mannequin continued. “She, as a pal, has taught me so much about style. She’s such a curious individual. Interested in books, materials, artwork, museums, literature. She’s such a hungry individual for data and for information and for the issues she’s into—and you see all of it in her style.”
Karen Elson, Anna Sui Fall 1997
Scarlett White, Anna Sui Fall 2026
You’ll be able to see it, too, locally she’s constructed along with her model over the previous 35 years since its 1991 debut assortment. Spanning a number of generations, Sui has attracted a mishmash of designers, fashions, and artists of all ages—who’re all wanting to cross alongside their love (and classic items) to the following cohort of “Anna Sui women.” Elson, for starters, sat entrance row to observe her daughter Scarlett White open the Fall 2026 show—almost three a long time after she first met Sui at age 18, when she herself walked her first-ever New York present.
Char Defrancesco and Marc Jacobs on the Anna Sui Fall 2026 present.
Anna Sui and Marc Jacobs in New York Metropolis in 2025.
The “full circle” feeling was echoed by many within the viewers, together with Sui’s longtime pal Marc Jacobs. Jacobs reminisced about encountering the designer on the rooftop at Danceteria, the New York dance membership energetic throughout the identical period because the British New Romantics subculture that impressed Sui’s Fall 2026 assortment. “I may need seen her at a membership, however the first time we met and talked was at Charivari, after I was working there,” he shared, referencing the now-closed avant-garde boutique the place he obtained his begin as a teenage stockboy. “She got here in carrying all of her pirate regalia that she had made.”
Marc Jacobs at an Anna Sui occasion in New York Metropolis in 1992.
He wasn’t the one one whose recollections of Sui contain vivid aesthetic imagery. “I like the world she’s constructed, and I like what number of recollections I’ve tied to her garments over time,” Sui’s niece, Jeannie Sui Wonders, shared from a couple of seats down, the place she sat simply as excited to see the present as the remainder of the company. “My silver beaded flapper-esque senior promenade costume, these attractive wool and embroidered suede coats my mother would put on after I was rising up that I now steal from her, the primary piece of clothes I ever obtained of hers which was this slinky skirt go well with that I nonetheless love to wear down.”
Jeannie Sui Wonders, Stella Lucia, and Morgan Maher
Household is embedded within the DNA of the model, and for the Fall 2026 assortment, that was made further clear when Sui devoted the gathering to her mom. Talking on the multigenerational affect of her model, she summed it up clearly: “I believe that we’re all the identical. It rocks our world once we see a glance, once we see an eyeliner, and it would by no means change. That’s what the thrill’s at all times been with Anna Sui. The whole lot resonates, the packaging, the colour of the lipstick, the glitter, that’s all what it’s about, and I need to share that with all of the younger lady on the market.”
