Sandy Liang is stuck in the past. Recently, the designer has been obsessed with the toys she played with as a child in the ’90s. “I’m a 32-year-old who loves scrolling eBay for old Polly Pockets,” says Liang a few days ahead of her Spring/Summer 2026 collection, which was presented on September 14 at the restaurant Buddakan. Known for her girlish designs, Liang has long found inspiration in her childhood. But this season’s collection took nostalgia to the extreme. While most designers seem to be taking Caroline Bessette-Kennedy and Bianca Jagger as muses, Liang’s nostalgia for childhood has led her to a very different muse: Huguette Clark, a 20th-century reclusive heiress who collected dollhouses.
Clark’s Fifth Avenue apartment was filled with dollhouses, and she built rooms specifically to keep them safe. “I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of preserving your childhood in different ways,” says Liang. “Being stuck in that time, that’s something I’m dealing with myself.” In her collection, this meant skirts covered in protective PVC, dresses decorated with doll-sized items of clothes, and sweet doll-like dresses.
It’s all excessively whimsical and girlish—lace doilies, a commonplace item in dollhouses, are represented heavily throughout the clothes in the form of leggings, tops, and bandanas. But Clark, Liang’s primary muse, does bring some darkness into the collection. After all, the heiress lived vicariously through her dolls. “Even just being a nostalgic person like myself, it’s sad because you’re constantly wanting to escape back to the past.” One will be hard-pressed to find any hint of such sadness in the clothing, however. “At the end of the day, I make clothes I want to wear,” Liang explains.
