Todd Robinson

Dr Todd Robinson is a Senior Lecturer in the UTS School of Design and an award-winning interdisciplinary researcher, artist, curator, and designer. His research examines the politics of embodiment, exploring how bodies are shaped and made visible through dress, material practices, institutional systems, and cultural histories. Working across fashion studies, contemporary art, curatorial practice, and interdisciplinary collaboration, his work investigates how clothing mediates relationships between bodies, identity, knowledge, and power, with particular attention to questions of visibility, inclusion and exclusion, and archival knowledge.

Drawing on his background as an award-winning fashion designer in the 1990s and early 2000s, Robinson’s research integrates fashion theory, theories of embodiment and affect, archives, decoloniality, and emerging technologies. He develops interdisciplinary methodologies spanning critical theory, historical and cultural analysis, curatorial research, and practice-led inquiry. Across these approaches, he examines how garments and bodies, in their materiality, participate in the production of individual and collective identities, and how fashion operates as a site where cultural meanings, systems of power, and embodied experiences intersect.

Robinson has an international research profile, publishing in leading journals including Fashion Theory, International Journal of Fashion Studies, Fashion Practice, and Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion. His recent research engages questions of queer visibility, fashion and weather, decoloniality, anti-Islamophobia, fashion archives, cultural memory, and the relationship between dress and structural or historical forms of violence. He serves as an external reviewer for leading journals, a doctoral examiner, and a supervisor within the UTS Imagining Fashion Futures Lab, providing research leadership and mentorship to emerging scholars and practitioners across fashion and interdisciplinary design.

Robinson was a finalist in the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes (2024) for CLOAK, a social-impact research project exploring queer visibility in STEM through collaborations between scientists, fashion designers, and photographers. He was a Research Fellow at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences ( 2022) developing Futuring Weather: Thinking, Making and Wearing through the Powerhouse Collection, which examined fashion, climate, and material practice. He guest-edited a special issue of Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion titled Atmospheres ( 2024) . Current projects include an research residency with the Sydney Nano Institute, University of Sydney, investigating fashion, textiles, and nanoscience ( 2024-2026)  and a curatorial project No Place for Mannequins: Remaking the Fashion Archive (2026) an international exhibition and symposium exploring fashion archives, cultural memory, and institutional forms of knowledge production. He is currently Co-editor of a special issue “Clothing and Dress in Times of Mass Violence” in The International Journal of Fashion studies ( 2026) which examines clothing and dress, in contexts of conflict, displacement, and historical violence.