Toby Slade

Toby is a fashion researcher in the UTS Imagining Fashion Futures Lab and an authority on Japanese fashion and popular culture. His current research focuses on the history, contemporary forms and changing meaning of luxury in Japan, revealing shifts in definitions of social value and patterns of consumption throughout history.

Toby joined UTS after more than 16 years at the University of Tokyo and Bunka Gakeun University in Japan. He is the author of two books: Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History (Berg, 2009) was the first English-language book to explore the entire historical sweep of fashion and clothing in Japan, with a particular emphasis on the modernity of Japanese clothing and its implications for contemporary theories of fashion. This work cemented Toby’s reputation as an authority on Japanese fashion history. His second book, Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018), looks at fashion as a central component of popular culture.