Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil is an award-winning design historian who works at University of Technology Sydney. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

He began his career researching Australian design. His first thesis, ‘Designing Women’ (1920-1940) discovered a lost of world of Sydney interior design by women and gay men, and he stitched their contributions as powerful and relevant into Northern hemisphere debates (‘Art History’ journal, 1994).

Most recently he has published on the creative practitioners of Paddington and Darlinghurst. For a decade he was Professor of Fashion Studies at Stockholm University where he worked to argue for a place for fashion research in the Humanities system. More recently he was Academy of Finland (FiDIPro) Distinguished Professor, Aalto University (2014-18) for a major international project on methods for studying performance costume.

Publications include: ‘The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives’, 2010 (with G. Riello);  ‘Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, Renaissance to the Present Day’ (4 Vols. 2009); ‘‘Pretty Gentlemen’: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-century Fashion World’ (2018). McNeil writes for major exhibitions including Los Angeles County Museum of Art (‘Reigning Men’), Kunsthaus Zurich (‘Fashion Drive’) and Sydney Jewish Museum (‘Dressing Sydney’). He is delighted to return to his first love, Interior design, with membership of this Advisory.