The fashion of The Walking Dead season 11 “spans the world”

The Walking Dead has had more than its share of iconic outfits over the years, from Negan’s leather jacket to Rick Grimes’ sheriff’s hat. Now, during the show’s final season, the wardrobes have been given a huge overhaul by new costume designer Vera Chow. Killing zombies has never looked more fashionable!

The AMC zombie series has a lot of interesting costume ideas to play around with this season, especially given the arrival of the Commonwealth, a highly advanced community with over 50,000 citizens. Rather than sticking to the tried-and-tested from previous seasons, Chow has searched high and low across social media, including in BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities, to source an array of inclusive costumes that “spans the world.”

“A show like The Walking Dead has such a giant platform,” Chow told The Hollywood Reporter. She sees the gigantic audience — which averaged 4.5 million viewers per episode in season 10 — as the perfect opportunity to highlight designers often passed over by TV shows, from Hong Kong’s Hamcus to Nigerian designer Imad Eduso and beyond.

"I have to interact with every single vendor, and talk about the show. But I feel like that actually helps me think about the characters more than just plowing through a Bloomingdale’s and being like, ‘This looks like Yumiko.’ ‘This looks like Daryl.’ ‘This looks like Carol.’"

See some terrific costume designs on The Walking Dead!

After each episode airs, Chow takes to her Instagram account to share closer looks at some of the costumes. Seeing them like this really helps you to appreciate the hard work that goes into them. For instance, take a look at this Reaper costume:

Chow also worked on costumes for the six additional season 10 episodes. See this one of Mays (Robert Patrick) from episode 1019, “One More“:

Finally, I’m a big fan of this shirt Norman Reedus wore in “Find Me.” An incredible amount of work went into making it just right.

“We overdyed a shirt,” Chow wrote. “Washed it multiple times in tsp+synthrapol. Did acrylic paint, airbrush, oiling, ran it through a belt sander in some places and hand pumice in others. Then we found spots sun/rain/wear+tear will happen and used a controlled bleach v.s. hydrogen peroxide spray . Handripped ‘weak’ seams, and handstitched it back. And then, we did it all over again on a few more shirts.”

I can’t wait to see which other costumes are in store as we meet more characters. Seeing underrepresented designers get some publicity in one of the world’s biggest franchises is very exciting.

You can see Chow’s Walking Dead portfolio here. The Walking Dead season 11 continues Sundays on AMC. For AMC+ subscribers, new episodes drop one week early.

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