Dr Harriette Richards is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT University, Melbourne. She is a cultural studies scholar whose work sits at the intersection of fashion, ethics and cultural politics.
Harriette is co-founder of the Critical Fashion Studies research group, the Designing Fashion for Social Change theme leader in the Centre of Material and Textile Exchange (CO:MADE) and the Creative Futures theme leader within the Social Enterprise Research Network (SERN).
She received her BA (Hons) and MA from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand and her PhD in Cultural Studies from the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Her work has been published in a range of journals and books, including Rethinking Fashion Globalization (Bloomsbury 2021) and Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress (Palgrave Macmillan 2023). She is also a regular commentator on fashion and culture for Australian and international news media.
In 2022, Harriette was awarded the RMIT School of Fashion and Textiles Research Achievement Award and, in 2025, as part of the Bachelor of Fashion Enterprise team, she was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence and was named one of the College of Design and Social Context’s Top Performers in the RMIT Media Stars Awards.
