Olivia Baba

By Ginger O’Donnell

In many ways, Olivia Baba, BFA ’23, was the quintessential multitalented applicant to WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. She had cultivated her passion for and skills in fashion design from an early age — asking her mom to take sewing classes when she was just 7 years old and spending her remaining childhood under the tutelage of a series of seamstresses, boutique owners, and clothing designers in the Bay Area. These women instilled in her a passion for sustainable design and modeled how to preserve and repurpose materials whenever possible.

But when it came time to choose a college, Baba desired a strong academic environment where she could fully develop her wide-ranging interests. After visiting WashU’s campus with her father, she applied early decision on a gut-level conviction that the Sam Fox School was the place for her. “I was convinced I was meant to go to this school, and that I would get in,” she recalls. “And then I did.”

Today, Baba continues to cast a broad net when it comes to inventive opportunities that span different expertise areas. Her interdisciplinary orientation has landed her a variety of leadership positions that allow her to flex complementary creative muscles. “I’m still exploring new things in my life and trying to figure out what I really love,” she says.

Right now, that means helping new early-stage consumer and fashion-tech startups to grow and gain traction as a product marketing strategist. Additionally, it involves sharing her fashion musings and industry insights in “Fashion in Context,” a media and community platform she launched in June 2025 about innovation in today’s evolving fashion landscape — which quickly earned her recognition as one of Substack’s Top 100 Rising Voices in Fashion & Beauty. In these roles, Baba applies skills she developed as a WashU undergraduate in writing electives she took for fun. “The creative writing courses I took at WashU were so fulfilling,” she says. “I took them purely for enjoyment, and they were a much-needed imaginative outlet.”

Baba credits the Mend Fashion experience with introducing her to the startup world and schooling her in the business savvy to now guide other creative ventures in her role as a social media and marketing strategist. “Working on Mend at WashU was an amazing introduction into entrepreneurship,” she says.  

Another WashU connection, and Baba’s current boyfriend, Owen Zhang, BS ’23, also propelled her development in the entrepreneurial space. He introduced her to a global professional network called the Sigma Squared Society, which unites promising entrepreneurs under the age of 26 across 35 countries and five continents, matching them with like-minded founders, mentors, investors, and more. “It’s such a welcoming and collaborative group of people that I’ve been lucky to know,” Baba says. “You get to meet people from very different startup environments who bring unique, interesting knowledge and experience from those spaces.”

“Sometimes people think a fashion-design degree is very limiting,” she says. “But I think it teaches you how to think and look at the world. I believe that creatives make the best founders and entrepreneurs. We have so many dreams, and we are very scrappy about how to figure them out.”

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