Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil

Biography

Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil FAHA is an award-winning design historian internationally known for his work on fashion and design. Trained in Art History at UQ, ANU and Uni Sydney, he is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Peter has lived in Sweden and Finland, is an ADFAS Australian Lecturer, and has led student and advanced tours since 2000.

Peter has a BA Hons, Research Masters and PhD in art and design with a focus on European and Australian art and material culture from the eighteenth century to the present day. For a decade he was Foundation Professor of Fashion Studies at Stockholm University where he worked to establish the dignity of the topic in the European university system. More recently he was Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor, Aalto University (2014-18), 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 on the Sydney suburb of Paddington and Darlinghurst, and speaking in public about design around Australia. McNeil currently supervises postgraduates from around the world, opening his vision to new cultures and experiences.

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’.

Peter has curated and written for exhibitions with the Sydney Jewish Museum (‘Dressing Sydney’), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (‘Reigning Men’), Kunsthaus Zurich and the Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology.

Peter was awarded a UTS Human Rights Award in 2018.

Peter first took student groups to India in the early 2000s, working closely with Australian and Indian academics. More recently he has designed and led cultural tours with a focus on fashion and design. Living in Sweden and Finland part-time for close to 15 years, he himself is an avid overseas traveller, generally visiting new destinations in Europe, USA and Asia every year. Peter studied French and German at University and during lockdown learned Introductory Japanese.