Dr Alice Payne is a Professor and Dean of the School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT. Her research centres on environmental and social sustainability concerns throughout textile and apparel industry supply chains. Alice has examined perspectives on sustainability along the cotton value chain, the cultural and material flows of post-consumer textile waste, and design processes of mass-market product developers, independent fashion designers, and social entrepreneurs. She is author of the book Designing Fashion’s Future: Present Practice and Tactics for Sustainable Change (Bloomsbury 2021), co-editor of the book Global Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion (Bloomsbury 2019) and co-author of the second edition of Fashion Trends (Bloomsbury 2021).
Alice is also an award-winning designer and has exhibited in Australia and overseas. In 2014 her design work was featured in the book A Practical Guide to Sustainable Fashion. With colleagues, their Refashioning Circular Design guide won the 2025 Best in Class Gold Good Design Award, Fashion. Her recent work explores speculative approaches to design for disassembly. In collaboration with colleagues and students, Alice has also investigated bio-textiles – creating textiles from living bacteria to form a vegan leather.
Contact Alice via her RMIT staff profile.
View full list of publications at Alice’s ORCID account, RMIT research repository, and QUT ePrints.
View side project Little Drawings Substack here.