Interview: Ann Foley and Evolving the Costume Design in ‘The Last of Us’ Season Two

The Last of Us, adapted from the Naughty Dog video game, has been one of the most intensely and articulately crafted TV series of the past few years. With Season 2 releasing in April of 2025, that level of craft continues. One element of the craft that has a huge impact on the storytelling is the costumes, handled by Ann Foley in Season 2.

In this conversation, Ann discusses her work on Season 2 of The Last of Us, offering insight into how clothing choices deepen the storytelling of a post-apocalyptic world in flux. With the series jumping five years ahead and shifting focus to new environments like the thriving community of Jackson and the harsh landscapes of Seattle, Foley breaks down the thoughtful evolution of Ellie’s wardrobe, the individualized complexity of the Infected, and the symbolic costuming of new characters like Dina and the Seraphites. Through a blend of thrifted finds, custom builds, and game-inspired detail, Foley’s designs add another layer to the series’ immersive world-building.

Read our full conversation with Costume Designer Ann Foley for The Last of Us Season 2 below.

Hi! This is Danny Jarabek here with Awards Radar, and I’m very delighted to have with me today Ann Foley, Costume Designer for Season 2 of The Last of Us. Ann, thank you so much for joining me!

Ann: Thank you so much for having me!

Absolutely. I’m very excited to talk to you about this season of the show. I had the opportunity to talk to a few people behind the scenes from Season One and was very excited to talk to more people involved now with this season. Starting there—the evolution of the series from Season 1 to Season 2, and with you stepping in to take on the costumes—what were some of the major talking points and ideas you were considering in conversations with Neil [Druckmann] and Craig [Mazin]?

Ann: Well, we have a five-year time jump, and this season we really get to see Jackson. We really get to go into that community. So that’s where the conversation started: how do we flesh out Jackson? Where do we want to go with this? We wanted to make a huge difference between the Jackson residents and the folks coming in—the refugees—and show that difference. A little more color this season in Jackson, because it’s a thriving community. They have electricity, they have water. Season One was a road show with Ellie and Joel going from one QZ to another, which were not thriving communities. These were people living on the edge with whatever they could find. That’s not Jackson. That was the big difference we wanted to show between the two seasons. Also, with the infected—which is another community unto itself—we wanted to show them a little more. We wanted to see that integration between the cordyceps and their costume, how the cordyceps would grow out of the weave of the clothing and start to become one. We spent a lot of time on some really awesome close-ups of the infected. My team and I tried to give each one a little backstory: who was this person before they got bit and became infected? Every single one has a unique costume and color palette so you can see that humanity—who they once were. Specifically for the infected in Season 2, we wanted to show more color and texture in them so they would stand out from the snow and blizzard. When you saw them coming up and out, you really saw them. They didn’t just blend in. So those are some of the highlights, I would say.

Yeah, that’s amazing. The contrast in how it’s shot, with those first two episodes happening in the winter—it definitely stands out. Of course, this is an adaptation of a very popular video game with a lot of fans. What was some of the inspiration you were drawing in comparison to how these characters are presented with their clothing in the game?

Ann: The source material is incredibly important. It’s important to every single person working on the show—it’s important to the actors, to me, to the fans, especially Craig and Neil. What I do for every episode is print out imagery from the game that matches the episode we’re working on. I have boards for every episode, and I draw on those when creating costumes.Sometimes it’s a total one-for-one, like in Episode 6 with Ellie’s T-shirt that she wears to the museum. I wanted that to be exact. In the game it’s a tank top, but for the show—and for Bella—I made it a T-shirt. We’re showing this time jump, and Ellie is a teenager, not an adult, which you see later in the episode. A baggier T-shirt helped the silhouette feel more like a child. The tank top felt more adult to me. So you’ll see changes like that—little shifts—but for the most part, I really tried to stay true to the spirit of the game and the source material.

Continuing on that conversation with Ellie: one of the interesting things about craft work in TV is seeing characters evolve from one season to the next—especially with someone like Ellie, who goes from 14 to 19 years old. She experiences a lot of changes in personality and in what’s happening around her. How did you want to reflect that in the character design through costumes?

Ann: That was one of the more fun aspects of Season 2 for me—Ellie’s arc and seeing her emotional change from a 14-year-old kid to a 19-year-old young adult. We did that with color palette. You really see it in Episode 6, where Ellie wakes up on her birthday turning 15. She’s in a baggier T-shirt that has color and pattern. As the episode goes on, the palette shifts. It gets a little darker, a little bluer. She starts to mirror Joel a bit with the plaids and his color palette. That was intentional. As we get into Seattle, a lot of the pattern is stripped away completely. It becomes shades of blue and dark green to reflect that emotional place where she’s at.

She spends a lot of time with one of the newer characters this season—Dina—who she becomes quite close with. How did you want to play off what you were doing with Ellie in terms of her color palette and how that translated to Dina?

Ann: Dina is the light in Ellie’s life. She’s effervescent—full of joy and life. And Isabella is like that in real life. It just seemed natural to put her in color. She has more color in the game, but it’s a bit muted. I took some of those palettes and transferred them into her costumes. Specifically, the shirt she wears in Seattle is the same color as her jacket in the game. I put that color on her shirt so I could give her the fantastic Aviator Nation jacket with the rainbow on it. That jacket was initially just on my mood boards that I showed Craig and Neil at the beginning of prep. Neil was really drawn to it. We had a conversation about how Aviator Nation wasn’t really in our timeline—they were formed in 2006, and clothing production stopped in 2003. But we felt it was such an iconic piece for Dina. It had a cool ‘90s vibe, the rainbow, the colors—it just felt like Dina. So we used the jacket anyway because it served the story. In Season One, Joel’s jacket wasn’t in the timeline either—the Flint and Tinder jacket—but it didn’t matter because it was perfect for Joel. It’s always about what serves the story, moves it forward, and what’s best for the characters.

To your point about the timeline—that’s something I was very curious to ask about. It’s sort of a spin on designing costumes for a period piece. You have this harsh cutoff of everything technically being produced before 2003, even though this season takes place in 2029. How did you go about sourcing or prepping the clothing to reflect that period accuracy?

Ann: I’d say probably 95% of the clothes for Jackson were thrifted. We tried to stay in that late ‘90s to early 2000s timeline. When it came to the cast, some pieces were thrifted, but a lot was made for Bella and Joel. I wanted to stay with brands that were around during our timeline—Carhartt, Lee, Levi’s, Wrangler, even Vans. It was important to use those iconic, timeless brands. If we needed multiples for some of the infected, we went to those brands too—like the Gap.

And Ellie trading in the Chucks for boots is called out in the text too. So you got a little call-out as well. One more question for you—how do you deal with the extra little details that go into costume design, specifically for the Seraphites? That’s something I’m really interested in. They’re a new addition in Season 2. How did you conceptualize detailing their outfits, especially since there’s such a contrast in how they present themselves compared to the rest of civilization?

Ann: It’s a great story about community—community and tribalism. I loved delving into the Seraphites. It was one of the more exciting things about Season 2 for me and one of the things that drew me in. My concept artist, Imogene Chayes, and I started working on the Seraphites with Ashley Swidowski at Naughty Dog. She’s one of the game designers, and we had several conversations with her about how they got to the place they did with the Seraphites. That helped me figure out where I wanted to go from there. I changed the raincoats to ponchos because it didn’t make sense that this Luddite group making their own tools and clothes would have raincoats. But ponchos made sense. They’re by the water, in an abandoned marina—maybe they found canvas from old boats and used that to create the ponchos. You might notice different shades of canvas in them—like they patchworked them together. Each Seraphite has a hand-painted symbol on the back that my breakdown team created. Every symbol is unique and different to whoever is wearing that garment.

Yeah, it’s really amazing. Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to chat with you about the second season of The Last of Us. Again, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it, and best of luck with everything moving forward.Ann: Thank you, Danny. I appreciate it.