Creator Spotlight with YouTuber and Fashion Designer Zoe Hong
Headshot Photographer: Liz Caruana
We’re thrilled to introduce fashion designer, illustrator, teacher, author, and YouTuber, Zoe Hong. She has been able to build a YouTube channel with over 634k subscribers. Throughout her success, she has chosen to prioritize environmental health alongside creativity and ethical responsibility. After reading her spotlight blog, we encourage you to follow her on Instagram and Bluesky, and be sure to also subscribe to her YouTube Channel.
What was the inspiration behind becoming a creator? What do you enjoy most about the creative process?
It was less inspiration and more natural progression. I’ve wanted to be a fashion designer since I was a little girl. I’ve been drawing little girls wearing dresses ever since I got my first 8 piece set of Crayola markers. I went to fashion school, got my BFA, and worked in the industry as a designer. One day, I was asked to teach a class at a fashion school. Its reputation was and remains quite prestigious. I immediately fell in love with teaching. It was my sister’s idea to start teaching on YouTube to broaden my reach. I loved working in the industry but the transition to teaching always felt right.
As my channel started to grow, I had to choose between teaching at the university or going full time on YouTube. I felt the opportunity to reach more students with my ideals on well-designed product, sustainability, and a more ethical fashion industry lay with YouTube so I quit the university.
In many respects, I feel more creative as a teacher than as a full time designer. I have to create scenarios and design example collections all the time, crossing different niches and price points, for my students. I get to come up with fun new outfits for my illustration tutorials. I love drawing and I love teaching drawing. And coming up with all these examples for my book, Fashion School in a Book, was invigorating for my brain that gets bored easily.
When did you first become aware of copyright, and why?
Copying is rampant in fashion. I’ve always been distantly aware of people copying other people’s designs, and how difficult it is to prove copyright in a legal sense in fashion design. I went to school hearing about the legal battles of the first fast fashion copies of designer looks, before these fast fashion companies got a bit more savvy about how exact their replicas were. And now everything moves so fast, companies have to pick and choose their battles.
It’s still common practice for a lot of these cheaper fashion brands to “shop for ideas.” The general consensus now is copying big brands is okay because they have plenty of money and staff to develop new ideas, whereas you’re supposed to draw the line at copying smaller, lesser known designers.
Another common practice in fashion is to have interviewing designers do a project for the hiring brand. The premise is to test whether a designer can mesh their own style with the hiring brand’s style. And no, the interviewing designers do not get paid for this. This often results in the job mysteriously no longer needing to be filled, and familiar looking designs showing up a season later.
Have you experienced copyright infringement and, if so, how has it affected you personally and financially?
The clearest infringements have been of my work as a teacher online. People would download my videos and upload them to their own channels or other social media accounts all the time. The first time it happened, I about had a panic attack. I was furious! I blasted them all over my own social media, warning people about fake accounts posting my work. I get paid on YouTube through the ads that run before my videos, so if people are watching the thief accounts, they’re not watching my channel, and I lose out on that money.
Thankfully, YouTube has great tools to help deal with this kind of thievery. They even have tools that find videos that feature your work and report them to you so you can check to see if they’re flat out stealing your work or they are (legally) using snippets to review or respond to your work. In my experience, YouTube is the platform that helps creators the most with copyright claims. They make the process very smooth.
What do you do when you encounter someone stealing something you’ve invested your intellect, time, and money into?
I fill out the claim form for the platform where the copying took place. If a YouTube claim has been investigated and the thief account has been found guilty, the video is removed and the thief account gets a copyright strike. Too many strikes and their channel either gets suspended or taken down entirely.
I had a situation where a channel continued to steal my videos and continued to rack up copyright strikes. They actually wrote me several emails to plead their case. They insisted that they were providing their students with an education they couldn’t afford so they could learn, train, and escape poverty. That would tug at my heartstrings if my own YouTube videos weren’t completely free to watch also! Also, no one is stopping them from watching my videos, learning, and crafting their own lessons.
What is the best piece of advice that you would give other creators in your field about copyright and how to protect themselves?
Don’t let your fear of being copied stop you from creating with your whole chest and sharing that beauty with the world. Don’t let anything stop you from the joy of the work.
What is your biggest copyright-related challenge?
These days, I mostly wonder what will happen with my book, Fashion School in a Book, and if I’ll have to deal with any copyright issues from thieves. I don’t stress about it too much but the thought is way back there in a corner of my brain.
How has AI technology impacted your works and career?
I think of AI as a tool like any software program. You can learn how to incorporate AI into your design process but, if you don’t know how garments come together, and how to fit said garments on real people, no AI tool can help you. We are, in the end, dealing with physical product and robots do not sew.
I recently attended a great talk about new AI tools being developed in the fashion industry. The vast majority of them actually focus on data culling and organizing and how that data can be used in better merchandising, smoother shipping logistics, things of that nature.
On the teaching side of things, several new subscribers and business clients have informed me that they found me because ChatGPT and DeepSeek recommended me as the best source for fashion design education. While I have a healthy dose of skepticism and wariness towards AI, apparently AI loves me.
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