Gap just released an animated ad to promote its collection with designer Sandy Liang, and we need it to become its own TV show ASAP.
Created by animator Annie Choi, who has a history of illustrating campaigns for luxury fashion labels, the ad stars a young girl modeled after Liang herself. While dreaming up new clothing designs inside her childhood bedroom, the girl discovers that her closet has been imbued with magical powers—and when she opens its doors, she’s transformed, Sailor Moon–style, into a new version of herself dressed head-to-toe in Gap x Sandy Liang.
The Gap x Sandy Liang ad, titled “Sandy’s Dream Closet,” is part of the roll-out for Liang’s biggest-ever collaboration with Gap, launching online and in select Gap stores October 10. The collection includes jackets emblazoned with Liang’s iconic bow symbols, structured-yet-feminine denim, and even a line of baby clothes. Everything ranges from just $15 to $268.
Choi’s fantastical animation embodies the sweet, youthful spirit of the collection, which, Liang told Fast Company, was made “for your inner child.” “I love that we’re telling the story through animation,” Liang says. “I think it’s the perfect way to express the energy that I’m trying to convey with the collection.”
“Creating universes that invite people to imagine more”
Within Choi’s oeuvre, anything is possible. An ordinary loaf of bread can transform into a fashionable shoe; a Parisian office building can morph into a puzzle box; and the stars in the night sky are pretty enough to literally eat like candy. Over the past several years, her creative, surrealist animations have become a sought-after asset for fashion brands including Hermès, Burberry, Dior, and Loewe.
“When I started collaborating with fashion brands, it felt like a natural extension of what I already loved doing: creating universes that invite people to imagine more,” Choi says. “Fashion gives me a language of texture, form, and transformation, and animation gives it motion and life. Together they create something that feels both tactile and surreal, which is exactly the space I love to work in.”
Bringing Sandy Liang’s fashion world to life
Before Liang even began designing the Gap collection, she says, she was already imagining an animation as a component of the campaign’s rollout. Her initial moodboard included inspiration from favorite anime properties like Sailor Moon and the Studio Ghibli film Ponyo.
When Gap’s marketing team told her that an animated video would be possible, she says, it was like a dream come true. Choi’s penchant for imagining designer brands through a playful lens made her the perfect compliment to Liang’s perspective on fashion as a means of embracing her own girlhood.
“Sandy’s Dream Closet” is inspired by Liang’s childhood in New York City. Its setting—an apartment complex in the Lower East Side above a Cantonese restaurant called “Congee Village”—is pulled directly from Liang’s own memories of her father’s restaurant of the same name. That backdrop is woven together with Liang’s experience growing up wearing vintage Gap.
Growing up with a child’s sense of wonder
“So much of Sandy’s world centers around imagination, nostalgia, and a sense of wonder,” Choi says. “I wanted the animation to carry that same feeling. I thought back to the shows I loved as a kid, especially the ones where transformation felt exciting and full of possibility, and used that energy as a guide. Since I also spent part of my early childhood in New York, the project felt personal to me, almost like layering my own memories on top of Sandy’s.”
In the film, Liang’s transformation represents, on a literal level, the idea of growing up. Symbolically, it’s also meant to capture “the power fashion has to help us become who we are meant to be,” Choi says. For her, bringing Sandy’s animated vision to life was “an honor.”
“It was so fun to see her reaction to the animated Sandy for the first time,” Choi says. “I think the final product truly captures her essence and the Sandy Liang world in a way that her customers, and Gap’s customers, can experience in a totally new way.”