Sandy Liang Puts a Bow on It
The fashion designer Sandy Liang recently boarded a hundred-year-old wood-panelled elevator in the basement of the Frick Collection and rode it to the museum’s first floor. There, she was ushered into the Cabinet Gallery for a private preview of “Ruffles & Ribbons,” a new exhibition of two dozen fashion plates, the hand-colored engravings that preceded fashion magazines, from the time of Marie Antoinette.
It’s a title that could be given to any of Liang’s recent collections, which feature a multitude of ruffles, ribbons, and bows—a dress from her Fall 2026 show was made entirely of the latter. One logo for her eponymous brand, which she founded in 2014 after graduating from Parsons, is a bright-pink bow. From her store on Orchard Street, not far from her family’s Cantonese restaurant, Congee Village, she’s sold bow-shaped earrings, leather bags with bows, bow-adorned puffer jackets (for humans and dogs), and hair bows of every ilk. Last year, partnering with Gap, she put bows on hoodies, trenchcoats, and jeans. She’s also teamed up with Beats by Dre for bow-patterned headphones, and with the Japanese brand Subu for beribboned pink slippers. Collectively, her designs call to mind the 2011 “Portlandia” sketch “Put a Bird on It!”—only with a different “B” word.
In 2023, social media pronounced Liang the leader of a “great bow-pocalypse.” The trend was so prolific that, in September of that year, a headline in the Times asked, “Have We Officially Reached Peak Ribbon?”
As the Frick’s “Ruffles & Ribbons” proves, there is no such thing. Organized by the curatorial fellow Yifu Liu, the show has trimmings in just about every frame. The idea was to lure visitors in with notions of decadence and frills, and then force them to confront the harsh realities of imperialism, colonialism, and the relentlessness of the fashion cycle. “Even the simplest, most frivolous fashions carry all these histories with them,” Liu said. “We named it ‘Ruffles & Ribbons’ kind of as a subversion. We made it so cute and so delicious. But, when you look at these images and you read the captions, you realize, Oh, these are historically significant works of art.”
The first plate depicts the world’s earliest bow-fluencer, Marie Antoinette. In it, she wears an elaborate red court gown with a wide hoop. In the second, a woman wears a chemise à la reine, a style of white dress the Queen popularized “that looks like what you’re wearing,” Liu said, pointing at Liang, who had on a white poplin baby-doll dress, with ribbons embroidered on the sleeves, and tulip-print leggings—both of her own design. Liu was wearing a black blazer, starched white culottes, and black oxfords.
Liang, a longtime follower of Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola’s 2006 bio-pic is one of her favorite movies), was eager to learn more about the Queen’s shopping habits. She oohed when Liu explained that ruffles were originally used to hide seams, which were left mostly unfixed so that expensive fabric could be reused when trends inevitably changed, and aahed at the sight of a lévite, an Ottoman-inspired open-front gown that was tied at the waist with a ribbon, which Marie Antoinette wore when she was pregnant.
With a seemingly unlimited clothing budget and access to goods and ideas from around the globe, the Queen had a vast, ever-evolving wardrobe. This meant that the public was constantly racing to keep up, turning to fashion plates to see, for example, whether they should style their curls in tall, “Bridgerton”-esque poufs or let them dangle from under a hat. Each year, Marie Antoinette ordered up to three hundred new gowns, and the winds changed accordingly.
“You’ve kind of killed the romance for me,” Liang said at the end of the tour. “Fashion nowadays is so fast—nobody has any time to think. You just have to put stuff out. I always thought that in Marie Antoinette’s day, you bought what you liked. But even she, or the women of that era, felt the pressure.” She sighed. “And there wasn’t even Instagram.”
Liu nodded: “It was intensely stressful for them.” Even worse, he added, “a lot of these women had gout.”
In a pink, chandeliered room in the Gilded Age mansion of a dead steel magnate, the past and present melded in a manner that was both unsettling and affirming. (Everyone knows what happened to Marie Antoinette.) In many ways, Liang felt validated. “The thing about ribbons and bows—do you ever get tired of them? I still get excited when I see a bow in a painting.”
At the end of the visit, an employee who wore bow-shaped earrings pointed out a wooden chest with gilded detailing that had belonged to Marie Antoinette. Liang bent down to examine it. “Look!” she said, pointing to a motif in the center. “A bow.” ♦