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.
Liang discovered Clark while scrolling on the real estate website Zillow. She found a listing for a “crazy mansion in [New Canaan], Connecticut” called Le Beau Chateau and, upon further digging, discovered that the mysterious heir to a copper fortune once owned it. As the New York Times once described her, Clark, who died in 2011 at age 104, was “a real-life Miss Havisham, a virtual spinster, alienated from most of her family, isolated in one candlelit room of her grand apartment.” Liang was immediately interested. Not only was Liang born at the same New York hospital where Clark chose to spend the last two decades of her life, despite being healthy—“Shout out Beth Israel”—but the two also share a preoccupation with childhood. “I think reading about Huguette made me feel really understood, like, ‘Oh, she could have been my friend.’”
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.
The ‘Gold Salon’ of the mansion at Fifth Avenue and 77th Street, the childhood home of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Liang also found inspiration in children’s movies: Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina and the 2010 animated film The Secret World of Arrietty. Both stories portray minuscule characters in a normal-sized world, using everyday objects in innovative ways—a clothespin to pull back your hair, a walnut shell to cradle a child, a rose petal as a cover. “It just makes me happy and dreamy and magical,” she says. “Imagine you had a walnut shell to sleep in.” This prompted Liang to manipulate scale throughout her collection. Baseball-sized buttons—as if plucked off a giant’s jacket—adorned normal-sized shoes, while oversized shoes were hung over shoulders as purses.
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.
