Ballet Flats, Bows, and Breastfeeding
Sandy Liang and the specter of working motherhood in the trend cycle of women's fashion.
This piece is concurrently published in HALOSCOPE. Read here.
I first started to notice counterculture turn on Flushing-raised designer Sandy Liang at the release of her Spring/Summer 2024 collection. Gallery openings boasted fewer and fewer feet clad in distinctive pink satin flats, people started to become weary of cheaply made dupes, and girls’ boyfriends seemed less and less likely to endorse the purchase of a hundred and seventy dollar bow headband accessory. By September of 2024, when leaked show notes for her SS25 collection were railed for sounding vapid and poorly edited, with bylines like “being a princess is a job, just like being a spy girl is a job” – it seemed like the women who built up Liang’s countercultural credentials had moved on from trying to dress like schoolgirls, and wanted something with more substance. The issue of course, being, these critics of self-infantilization had a history with the habit that was storied to say the least, and most of their criticism of what was clearly an intentional affectation hinged on the conceit that you could flirt with twirling your hair and saying you’re just a girl in your twenties, but once you hit thirty, it’s time to cut that shit out. As someone who goes hiking in Mary Janes and has been thrifting Catholic School uniform maxi skirts for the better part of my adult life, I consider myself considerably attuned to the ebbs and flows of how terms like “lolita,” “ballet-core,” “office siren,” and “coquette” influence the world of contemporary fashion, and moreover, I feel qualified to judge the very touchy boundaries between just criticism of intra-female self-infantilization, and mutually enforced misogyny. This is to say, I do not think all of Liang’s current detractors just hate to see women aging, and I also do not think all of her biggest fans are doing restorative feminist praxis by up-charging her often phoned in sponsored collaborations with Beats, Salomon, Target, and BAGGU on Depop. Like most divisive issues in contemporary fashion, the situation is nuanced. Something I have rarely seen brought up in the frequent and infinitely retweetable discourse about Liang’s pink ribbon empire, however, is that in 2024, her and her husband Dorian Booth had a beautiful baby boy named Rainer.
To be honest, this changes a lot for me. As the needlepoint of culture slowly creeps past the innate profitability of slapping a bow on something, I’ve found Liang’s continued efforts to raise a family while carving out a niche for herself in women’s Ready to Wear fashion more and more endearing. Her designs, clearly drawn from her on-the-ground experience as a bystander and participant in Flushing and NYC’s vast immigrant culture, seem so much more pointed when the basis for them is no longer imaginative. Put plainly, I find the whole coquette schoolgirl maxi skirt schtick far more compelling from someone who is actively raising a child. I was struck by Liang’s lucidity in her recent Interview Magazine conversation with Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast – another artist I adore, who knows a thing or two about balancing petty girlish sentimentality with out of body maturity.
ZAUNER: You didn’t have anxiety about your work suffering? My friend, who just got pregnant, is a painter and we were talking about it and she was like, “Are you more worried about not being a good mother or not being a good artist?” Which I thought was such a horrifying question.
LIANG: I think about that stuff under the surface, but I try to not let myself get wrapped up in it because you’re going to live the answer. “What will my career look like once I have a baby?” If I really thought about that question, it might’ve stopped me. I’m at the point in my life where I’m going to do what I want, and if my work suffers a little bit because of that, then that’s just going to be a part of my journey.
This answer seems incredibly liberatory to me. I think of someone like Paul McCartney, whose departure from The Beatles and solo career marked the birth of his daughter Mary, and trail-blazed the creation of the “dad rock” microgenre of singer-songwriter music. In these retrospective mythologies, men are not only allowed to have children, but are able to plumb the depths of fatherhood for artistic inspiration. In this sense, their fall from the annals of greatness is not so much a loss but a transition to something new. How wonderful it must feel as a female working artist to fall off and start a family, to let your work grow more austere or less appealing as you funnel your creative energy into cultivating new life – perhaps the greatest act of artistic creation in history. How chic, as a woman, to actually pursue the great summit of “having it all” – while acknowledging that the choice between an artistic career and a family is so rarely expected of your male counterparts. Better yet, to allow your work to reflect this yearning towards the child – retrofitting the oft-touted idea of yearning for some sort of imagined girlhood into the more meaningful practice of nurturing a real childhood future. I don’t care that Liang’s child is a boy, I’m excited to see how she dresses him – the care and motherly devotion she puts into making his little loafers or frilly little button up shirts.
Danish Rijksakademie-trained artist Lise Haller Baggesen’s book “Mothernism” is an endlessly beautiful assertion of the working mother’s place in contemporary art. In it, she grapples through epistolary dispatches to her sister, mother, and daughter with issues like rape culture, phallogocentrism, and the variability of emotion contained within the enterprise of bringing up a real live human being from your body. She responds to Kristeva’s short but incisive essay “Motherhood Today,” in which the seminal post-structural feminist theorist, who like Liang, had one baby boy, asserts:
What we lack is a reflection on maternal passion. After Freud and with Lacan, psychoanalysis has largely been preoccupied with the ‘paternal function’ — its need, its failures, its substitutes and so on and so forth. Philosophers and psychoanalysts seem less inspired by the ‘maternal function,’ perhaps because it is not a function but more precisely, a passion. The term ‘a good enough mother’, coined by Winnicott, who took this theme further than Freud, nevertheless runs the risk of playing down the passionate violence of the maternal experience.
In this respect, Baggesen argues for not only the recognition of motherhood’s inevitability in the life of the creative, but its unique and vibrant socio-psychological point of view:
“Beginning with the old feminist premise of the female as “the second sex,”11 and lesbianism as a third, I suggest that motherhood is a fourth … and hell, who knows? Maybe menopause is a fifth and so on … Because if we can accept motherhood as one sex among many, we can perhaps relieve the inevitable burden of motherhood perceived as a stagnant destination. Perhaps we can instead introduce it into a conversation opened up by queer theory, in which categories of gender are more fluid, moving and bleeding into each other. To have a true plurality of discourse, we need a conversation, not of motherhood as “myth” or “destiny” but as lived reality, inside (as well as outside) the “hallowed halls” of art and academia.”
You might think this is a lot to reconcile with a fashion house whose most recent F/W25 collection included a giant first place ribbon dress appliqué, but with looks including a Toys-R-Us baby tee rework of her brand name, paired with a laminated bright pink Frutiger Aero adjacent calendar skirt seemingly at home plastered on the wall of a takeout restaurant, I don’t think its impossible to connect the dots. If anything, I’ve actually found Liang’s most recent work to bear a certain self-assured maturity to it, collaging together vibrant colors and Polly Pocket like dollishness into something that feels quite literally marketed to ten year olds. I love that. There’s a photoset that Liang posted to her instagram recently, in which a friend’s child is swimming in her ballet slingbacks. I think this is the best possible future for her brand identity, one that responds to accusations of problematic infantilization from twenty three year old substack bloggers old enough to be her nieces with a resounding – “sorry, I have to make it to daycare in Midtown while still looking fab.”
At her best, I see Liang as a sort of zillenial Mary Cassatt, posting pictures of her face smushed up against her child’s in a way that asserts she can occupy the social roles of cool girl, creative, and mom at the same time. Making clothes not only for her own inner child, but for her actual children. There is a quote from Vouge in which, talking about her SS24 collection, she mentioned she is often inspired by groups of women who are matching – intentionally or not. “They don’t realize how beautiful they are when they’re standing together,” she says. Her work to me has always been this one specific image – a fascination with a group of schoolgirls walking home in Queens. It seems like from this one image, imagined or not, an entire brand identity emerges. This harmony is itself a sort of maternal instinct: to have matching mommy son outfits, to see your child as a beautiful part of a transcendent whole, picking him up at carpool, one minnow in a school of fish.
While talking with Zauner, the elephant in the room is raised – how do women artists who want kids reconcile a rigid creative perfectionism with the often overwhelming burdens of motherhood. Is there a middle path between not losing yourself in the role of homemaker, and also holding space for the creative energy one will eventially exert and deplete in the cultivation and curation of a child. If anything, this would be my thesis: that this question is only ever asked of women, and that there is a real and true artistic beauty in becoming more inaccessible and even unsuccessful in the name of bringing up a family – not sacrificing your career, but letting it mold to the contours of your holistic identity as both a woman and a mother. Some may not get it, and that’s fine. But love is not something to be afraid of, and it certainly is not something that diminishes the voice of an artist. Motherhood, in all its psychic intermingling of the woman’s identity with her child’s, demands a sort of fiery creative ego death, one that inevitably impacts the nature of one’s work. If I meet the right person in the thirties, fall deeply for them, and find myself at the precipice of starting a family like Zauner and Liang – how terrifying and how lovely it must be to face these questions. It truly brings me to tears imagining it, how sickeningly sweet it must feel to lose part of your audience, and to look in the eyes of my child and see a whole crowd of adoring fans.
ZAUNER: …I’ve been doing Japanese Breakfast for nine years. This will be my fourth album, and I would say that every single record I’ve made has been more successful than the last, and I live in constant fear and anticipation of, “When will I plateau and when will I begin to decline?” I don’t want to say this in an interview, but I keep thinking this is this one.
LIANG: I completely understand.
ZAUNER: And I think in some ways, when I arrive at that plateau, it will be both devastating and completely liberating.
Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.
I'm the same age as Liang - and similar ages when we had our sons. I've found that rather than alienate me from it, my relationship to and expression of hyper femininity in the usual "girlhood" signifier sense has been freer, more joyful, and more empowering than ever. In general motherhood has made my intellectual world as well as my emotional world richer and bigger.
I really appreciate your open-hearted exploration of Liang in this context!
Hi Audrey. This was a brilliant read. I wonder if I can raise one small edit: Paul McCartney never had a child named Linda. In fact, Linda is the name of his wife. His first daughter was named Mary.