Did your parents let you DRIP to the fullest??
Talkin' CHILDHOOD grails, FIRE fleeces, SWAGGY Chinatown elders & more with NYC designer Sandy Liang
Sandy Liang — she’s a popping NYC designer who’s cool as s**t…!!
Among other VIRTUES, Sandy is a crucial figure in the current GORP wave, thanks to the highly influential fire unisex fleeces she’s been putting out since 2017 — including a dog version (below right) that she just dropped last week to insulate my good gorpy puppers on these winter walks ??
Sandy also designs a bunch of dope non-fleece jawns, refracting references to late-‘90s pop-culture (from Virgin Suicides to SpongeBob to Destiny’s Child) thru a downtown NYC lens …
The other day we hit her up to discuss 1 of her most cherished possessions — a ‘90s Casio GEM — along with “unbeatable topics” such as coveting jawns that your parents DENIED you… why Chinese-grandma fits go so f**king hard … whether or not ‘90s SKECHERS were inadvertently avant-garde… and why FLEECES will NEVER DIE …
Blackbird Spyplane: We gotta kick this off with a little GORP GENEALOGY. When we think about the origins of the current fashion-GORP moment (as opposed to the original ‘90s GORP wave) we gotta give you props for sending some monster fleeces down the runway years before this sherpa s**t fully popped off again!!
Sandy Liang: “I would be so ultra-not-humble if I claimed that. You’re trying to trick me! [Laughs] No, I mean, I can see it. Who knows, right? The world is crazy. I designed the ‘Checkers’ fleece for spring ’17 because I was dating this guy who was super outdoorsy, and I looked at the womens’ fleeces on the market and they all sucked. They were like mauve and ‘shapely.’ I was like, What’s up with that? Why do I need to be ‘sexy’ when I’m hiking? My vibe is more Gap Kids, little boy, like, the hand-me-down Nautica polar fleeces my mom used to put me in…