Zoe Foster — BFA Fashion Design 2026

Collection

Bio

Zoe Foster is a Brooklyn based designer from California’s Central Coast whose work is rooted in an ongoing dialogue with the past. Drawing on themes of history, memory, and intimacy, she approaches design in a way that carries traces of labor, sentiment, and time. Her designs often reflect the language of working-class dress, reinterpreting its functionality through a contemporary lens.

With a background in technical design, she specializes in construction and fit. She considers herself as much a craftsperson as a designer, committed to the process of making as a way of thinking, and to the belief that nothing is created in isolation; everything is in conversation with what came before.

zoefosterdesign.com @xoephoster

The fields are emptied, the ground remembers what was taken: peat, flax, blight.

Pulled from earth, twisted, beaten, softened until it yields.
Patience in the work, rhythm in the hands.
Cloth carries its memory too.

Each seam holds a gesture, each fold recalls a touch.
The bend of a shoulder, the weight of a gesture within its weave.

Worn until the body imprints itself into the weft,until the fabric becomes another kind of skin.
Ripping, wearing, exhausting.

A dress unstitched is straw once more.
A shirt frays into thread, into flax, back to peat.
The cycle continues, relentless and tender.

Labor folded into form.
Threads unravel and entwine again.
Folk and Fallow.

This Fall/Winter 2026 collection, Folk & Fallow, examines clothing as a site of labor, extraction, and survival. Inspired by the lives of 19th-century cottiers and crofters of the British Isles, the collection draws from historical photos of garments, people, and places shaped by systems of indentured labor, agricultural dependency, and the economic and cultural pressures of English colonization and suppression.

My work also centers on the ephemeral nature of working dress. Clothing worn down to the body, thinned by repetitive movement, and altered by necessity. The garments of working folk have little endured as preserved objects, not many leaving the cycle of use, repair, more use, more repair, exhaustion, and eventually, a return to the earth. Peat, to flax, to cloth, to peat once more. In this context, clothing becomes a record of strain, movement, and endurance, holding the imprint of work, displacement, and survival.

Each look represents a distinct facet of lived experience I rever:

For the Baile, meaning “home” in both Irish and Scottish Gaelic, honors community, kinship, and cultural persistence in the face of suppression and displacement. Garments as kin.

For the Burden honors the physical toll of labor on the body and the garments warn over the body through distressing and structural fatigue. Garments as body.

For the Farewell mourns separation from land and kin under conditions of forced migration, carrying the weight of absence and the ache of departure. Garments as weight.

For the Hearth centers the intimacy of the home and domestic craft, honoring the unseen labor and care of washing, mending, and making. Garments as home.

For the Heirloom honors the few garments preserved through lineage, repair, and inheritance. Garments as memory.

Photo/Director: Leo Gianfagna
Producer: Bella Rieth
Associate Producer: Ryder Gilgen
Production Assistant: Adam Chadev

Talent:
Neva Anil
Maple Barker
Andre Delgado
Liz Heh
Sarah Zakaria