Emeritus Professor Peter McNeil

Biography

Emeritus Professor Peter McNeil recently retired after 40 years including Distinguished Professor in the art and design sector to focus on his work as a global lecturer and thought leader. Trained in Art History, History, and French at UQ, ANU and Uni Sydney, with extensive fieldwork in London and Paris, he is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Peter also lived and worked as Full Professor in Sweden and Finland for 15 years and taught in Singapore. McNeil is widely invited to speak in Australia and around the world (recently USA and Taiwan), and enjoys enriching adult learning and supporting local art ecologies by creating meaningful tours.

Peter has a BA Hons, Research Masters and PhD in art and design with a distinctive focus on both European and Australian art, design and the decorative or applied arts from the eighteenth century to the present day. He is particularly interested in how place shapes attitudes towards art making and how all the arts intersect with each other. For a decade he was Foundation Professor of Fashion Studies at Stockholm University where he worked to establish the dignity of a new topic. More recently he was Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor, Aalto University, working on performance costume. At the same time he maintained a strong focus on the local, working with Bathurst Regional Art Gallery on the award- winning exhibition The Unflinching Gaze (2017), producing histories of creativity and gentrification for the Sydney suburbs of Paddington and Darlinghurst, and unlocking regional gallery collections. In recent years he has shown strong academic support for the rise of Indigenous Australian fashion and textiles and has attended Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair since 2019.

His many readable publications include award-winners ‘The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives’, 2010 (with G. Riello); ‘Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, Renaissance to the Present Day’ (4 Vols. 2009); ‘Luxury: A Rich History’ (with G. Riello, 2016, in Polish 2017), ‘Fashion Writing and Criticism’ and ‘Fashion Journalism’ (with S. Miller, 2014, 2018). His monograph ‘Pretty Gentlemen’: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth- century Fashion World’ was published by Yale University Press in 2018 and has been praised in ‘The New York Review of Books’, ‘Times Literary Supplement’, ‘Literary Review’ and ‘World of Interiors’: Marina Warner named it a ‘Book of the Year’. You can also read many articles by Peter in ‘The Conversation’ free and online.

Peter has curated and written for exhibitions including Los Angeles County Museum of Art (‘Reigning Men’), Kunsthaus Zurich and the Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology. In 2026 he was part of a team awarded half a million dollars to work on the department store David Jones, its archive and Art Gallery as global design ambassador, 1950-1970.

Peter was awarded a UTS Human Rights Award in 2018 for his work with diverse and regional audiences.

Peter first took student groups to India in the early 2000s. He himself is an avid overseas traveller, generally visiting new destinations in Europe, USA and Asia every year. His policy is at least one new country a year. Peter studied French and German at University and during lockdown learned Introductory Japanese.