Sandy Liang wants to take me on a tour of her studio in the basement of a building on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Liang, dressed in bright blue Nike sneakers and baggy Supreme sweatpants, strides across the studio’s marble floor and turns the corner, where two models are already waiting. I should note: everything is a little more colorful in Sandy Liang’s universe, like you’ve popped a zany Snapchat filter over reality. So when you arrive at Liang’s studio, the first to greet you is a black-white-brown furred Australian Shepard named Tim Tam (Tim, for short). Decor consists of fluorescent lights, vases tall as people, and a pearlescent pink couch where you take a seat and then are offered either a water… or a Capri Sun. And those models? They aren’t the 600-calories-a-day kind, with the sort of cheekbones where birds can perch. They’re Liang’s grandma and aunt, sitting on a couch, grinning like kids who know they’ve brought home totally dynamite report cards.
The two women are longtime inspirations for Liang, who says she loves the effortlessness with which “Chinatown grandmas” get dressed. They’re wearing the item I’m here to talk to Liang about, which has turned her from culty womenswear designer to culty designer, period: a boxy jacket in a grey high-pile fleece cozy enough to induce narcolepsy, with tan trim zippered breast pocket, and an electric bolt of lemon-lime at the cuffs. The Chinatown grandmas are dressed in the fleece. And this season, plenty of men are, too.
Liang has worked as a designer since she graduated from Parsons in 2013, but didn’t ever intend to get into the granola-y staple. “I hated them when I was little,” Liang says. “I had my brother's hand-me-downs. They were like the Perry Ellis or Nautica pullovers with the polar fleece material because my mom was really against buying clothes when I was little… [fleeces] were just another ugly thing that I really didn’t like to wear that I just ended up wearing a lot because that's what was there.” But Liang’s quirky nostalgia and the whims of the market combined to lead her in an unexpected direction for her spring 2017 collection. “I was talking to my mentor,” Liang says, “and she was like, ‘You need to do more transitional outerwear. No one's buying 40 of your fucking shearling jacket in spring.’” So Liang started making denim jackets and puffers—and those fleeces she didn’t care for.
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Liang says she was so sure no one would want the item that she priced it as low as she could. “I wasn’t making any money on that [first] style,” she says. But every retailer Liang worked with at the time ordered the fleeces. Then the stores sold out, and they emailed Liang asking to restock. This season, Liang sent out a lookbook led by the Ollie fleece, featured on a female and a male model. But it wasn’t just any dude. Dressed in the fleece was the Vetements-wearing rockstar chef Danny Bowien, who is a friend of Liang’s. "One of my favorite things about Sandy's pieces is you get a sense of her personality and her interests,” Bowien told me over email. “The fleece is super wearable, it's something I layer and wear every day."
And Bowien is only one of many guys gravitating to Liang’s fleece. Menswear writer Nick Grant also picked the style up. I messaged him to find out why. “You know that whole thing about love at first sight?” he wrote back. “It's like that but with a fire garm. The fluorescent liner. The leopard details. The oversized fit. I may be a big black man but I'm a bad bitch in this fleece.” Liang says she now gets messages and emails from guys who want to know how the fleece fits, and there was an audible rumbling in the GQ office when the fleece was first released. Someone high-tailed it to my desk to talk to me about it, and ask how they could get their hands on one. GQ's site editor Chris Gayomali, another of the fleece's admirers, tells me, “A lot of the new fleeces coming out aren’t shaggy enough, but the Sandy Liangs are extremely pettable. I just want to feel like a Soho mom’s expensive dog.” (This is the first season she made the style oversized, which might help explain why guys are suddenly so interested.) And, of course, the style is immensely popular among women like Gigi Hadid.
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Liang is finding success among men, at least in part, because men like Grant are becoming more common: That is, men who are interested in fashion and are willing to trust their taste—even if that means wearing a fleece that is technically for women. That the humble fleece—most closely associated with Bay Area start-up nerds and insufferable finance bros—is having a moment helps. Liang chalks it up to nostalgia. “Fleece is immediately nostalgic and comfortable for everybody who grew up here,” says Liang. “Regardless of whether you owned your own jacket or not, you had something that was similar to it.”
The Ollie’s so successful that Liang is now looking into making more clothes that guys can wear. “The fleece was the gateway drug,” she says. “We were just having a merchandising meeting and I really want to do more T-shirts and stuff for future seasons. Easy-to-wear things that are not men's—they're just unisex.” She doesn’t say it explicitly but: more fleeces. Thank God, more fleeces.
In the middle of our conversation, I swing back to the fact that she thought no one would buy what’s become a hugely successful design. Why? “Because, price point-wise, why wouldn't you go to North Face or Patagonia or LL Bean and buy a fleece that's, like, kind of the same?” Liang says, before backing up. “I mean, obviously, very different, but for a quarter of the price.” Liang’s best-selling fleeces are a funny phenomenon, because, technically, she’s right: North Face and Patagonia make excellent versions. But the item is now in the stratosphere of fashion and guys don’t want to settle with the standard Patagonia. Instead, they want the next-level high-fashion take—the one designed by Capri Sun-sipping designers who are inspired by Chinatown grandmas.
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