Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey star in “The Last of Us.” (Liane Hentscher/HBO)

Ann Foley might be able to tell you how a once novel fungal contagion can turn seemingly stable people into violent flesh eaters and cause civilization to collapse.

She’s more likely, however, to tell you what people of all types in the HBO and HBO MAX series “The Last of Us” would wear.

Foley is the costume designer for the second season.

She’s no stranger to science fiction or fantasy. Her previous credits include “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D,” “Godzilla vs. Kong” and the action movie “Skyscraper.” She has also worked on the 2014 remake of the romcom “About Last Night.”

“That’s the beauty of what I do,” said Foley last week over Zoom.

“Even back in my days as an assistant costume designer, we’d jump from sci to (Steven Soderbergh’s) ‘Behind the Candelabra.’ You never know what you’re going to get to jump into next. I love the world building aspect of what we do.”

The new season takes place five years after its predecessor and features new factions like the Seraphites, a sect that could be considered a cult, and police and military forces.

To determine how to make these characters look, Foley is careful to follow the original Naughty Dog video game that inspired the series. Neil Druckmann, the co-creator of the game, also shares showrunner duties with Craig Mazin on the series.

“The source material is incredibly important to me. It’s important to the fans. There’s so much that went into that game,” she explained.

“Sometimes you have to make some changes to serve the story, the locations and what’s happening on the show itself. For example, in the game at the beginning in Jackson (Wyoming) during the blizzard, they’re all wearing lighter cotton coats. That’s great for the game. That’s not going to work for us when we’re shooting in the mountains in Alberta in the wintertime.

“They actually needed functional parkas, and I worked pretty closely with one of the artists at Naughty Dog, and we talked about how they came to the look for those characters.”

Visitors to Foley’s Instagram page can spot Pedro Pascal, who portrays Joel Miller in the series, sporting a hand knitted sweater to get through the cold.

“I wanted to give that to him, and it’s also a nice nod to Joel. This is a society where people barter. There’s no money really exchanged anymore. So maybe Joel went and fixed something at somebody’s house, and as a thank you, they knitted him a scarf, and Pedro loved that idea,” she recalled.

For Pascal’s co-star Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie, Joel’s surrogate teenage daughter, Foley had a different task.

“It’s little things like jeans that are a little slimmer in the leg, T-shirts are a little shorter in the body. Even the hem on the arm is going to be a little shorter. Everything is coming in a little bit instead of that baggy, teenager look,” she said. “It’s all about playing with the silhouette.”

For the Seraphites, Foley said the ecclesiastical garb they sport has to look credible in a world where there are no factories to make them.

“In the game they’re wearing raincoats, but I wanted to put them in ponchos. Since they’re living near the water, near an old marina, maybe they took old canvas from the boats and cobbled those ponchos together,” Foley said.

“When you look at their ponchos, there are different patches of canvas, different colors. Everything is sort of strung together with leather twine, so it has this very handmade quality to it. The Seraphite symbols were all hand-painted by my team.”

Throughout the conversation, Foley was quick to credit her collaborators like Druckmann and concept artists like Imogene Chayes and Ashley Swidowski of Naughty Dog.

“I don’t draw myself at all. I can do a little scribblers for imaging. I can’t do what (Imogene) does, and that’s why I love concept artists. I have been so fortunate to work with some of the best in the business,” she said.

Nonetheless, Foley demonstrates a remarkable eye for detail. When I incorrectly referred to the menacing beings in the game and series as “Zombies,” she politely corrected me.

“‘The infected.’ That’s what we prefer to call them on our show because that’s what they are. (When) we approached the infected this season … I wanted every one of them to actually have a little bit of a backstory and give them a little bit of humanity. They were just regular people until they got bit.”

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Costumer for ‘Last of Us’ striving for authenticity