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Robert Ott

Robert Ott

Professor, School of Fashion; Director, The Suzanne Rogers Fashion Institute
EducationBAA, Fashion Design – Apparel Production Management, Ryerson Polytechnical Institute; MMSC, Management of Technology & Innovation, Toronto Metropolitan University

Robert Ott is Professor of Fashion and Director of The Suzanne Rogers Fashion Institute. An educator, academic leader, and former fashion industry executive, his work connects fashion education with the changing structures, practices, technologies, and opportunities shaping the fashion industry. His teaching encourages students to examine critically how fashion is organized, produced, promoted, and experienced, while developing the judgement, adaptability, and awareness needed to identify their place within its future.

Ott served as Chair of Fashion and Image Arts and as Associate Dean of The Creative School, where his work advanced academic programming, experiential learning, entrepreneurship, and international education. He founded the Fashion Zone and Creative Enterprise Hub and was a founder of the Joe Fresh Centre for Fashion Innovation.

Before academia, Ott spent eighteen years with The Jones Group in senior executive roles spanning merchandising, product development, operations, marketing, and supply chain management. A contributor to international fashion education, he was named a Distinguished Member of IFFTI in 2025.

LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-ott-62004b14/      (external link, opens in new window) 

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-3027-3802 (external link, opens in new window) 

Robert Ott’s scholarly and creative work sits at the intersection of fashion and creative practice, entrepreneurship, craft studies, and organization studies. Trained in fashion design and production, he approaches creative practice not solely through questions of design and making, but as a site for examining how people develop knowledge, exercise judgement, organize work, build enterprises, and respond to changing professional conditions. Across his work, he is interested in scholarship that connects theory with practice and contributes to understanding and addressing the social, organizational, technological, and economic challenges facing creative practitioners.

His research developed initially through the study of artisanal fashion design. His master’s research in Management of Technology and Innovation examined how fashion entrepreneurs think, develop ideas, make decisions, and translate creative practice into viable enterprise. This established an interest in the relationship between creative decision-making, skilled practice, entrepreneurship, and the organization of fashion work. His subsequent research has extended these questions through craftship, shifting the focus toward how skilled work is learned, organized, evaluated, coordinated, and sustained.

His current research study examines craftship through extensive ethnographic research conducted in bespoke tailoring and shoemaking workshops. It investigates how craftsmanship is performed through embodied skill, materials, tools, tacit knowledge, judgement, learning, and the organization of work. Rather than approaching craftsmanship primarily as the accomplishment of an individual maker, the research considers how skilled practice develops among people and through the material and organizational conditions of work. This positions craftship as a means of examining broader questions about how people learn to judge, coordinate specialist knowledge, negotiate standards, respond to consequential decisions, and organize collective work.

Ott’s scholarship addresses several intersecting audiences. Within fashion and creative education, his work examines how education can prepare practitioners to navigate changing creative industries and connect critical inquiry with professional practice. His longstanding engagement with the International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institutes (IFFTI), including twelve years of service on its education initiatives and four years as Chair of the Education Initiative Sub-Committee, has provided an international setting for this work. Within craft studies and organization studies, his research uses the empirical specificity of making to investigate broader questions concerning skilled work, materiality, knowledge, judgement, learning, and organizing.

A further strand of his scholarly and creative activity concerns entrepreneurship and the longer-term development of creative practitioners. As founder and Director of The Suzanne Rogers Fashion Institute (SRFI), Ott leads a fellowship program providing sustained financial, educational, entrepreneurial, and professional support to selected TMU Fashion Design alumni as they establish and develop fashion businesses and professional practices in Canada and internationally. The SRFI provides an applied setting for examining how emerging designers move from education into professional practice, develop entrepreneurial capability, respond to changing industry conditions, make strategic decisions, and build sustainable creative enterprises over time. It also provides a platform for future research concerned with the challenges facing independent creative practitioners and the forms of support that enable them to navigate increasingly complex professional environments.

Future collaborative research will also extend questions emerging from the study of craftship beyond bespoke workshops. This work will investigate how principles associated with skilled collective practice, including judgement, coordination, learning, evaluation, material and technological engagement, and responses to consequential decisions, might inform the study of specialist and high-performance teams. Potential contexts include sport, healthcare, creative production, and other environments in which specialist knowledge, interdependent work, and situated judgement shape performance.

Across these activities, Ott’s scholarly and creative interests connect fashion systems, craftship and craftsmanship, embodied and tacit knowledge, materiality, organization of work, creative entrepreneurship, experiential learning, artificial intelligence and creative practice, and fashion education. While these interests address different scholarly and professional audiences, they share a concern with how knowledge can move between theory and practice and contribute to the capacity of creative practitioners and organizations to respond to changing conditions.

Selected publications and scholarly contributions:

  • Ott, R. (2026). “Craftship as an organizing condition.” PDW 05, Finding Craft in Your Research: Craft as a Lens for Studying Organizational Phenomena in the More-than-Human Society, 42nd EGOS Colloquium, University of Bergamo, Italy, July 8, 2026.
  • Ott, R. (2025). “Forced to collaborate: Does partnering with A.I. enhance creativity or undermine integrity?” 19th International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED2025) Proceedings, Valencia, Spain, March 3–5, 2025, pp. 5900–5906.
  • Ott, R. (2018). “The cordwainer’s lair: Contingency in bespoke shoemaking.” In E. Bell, G. Mangia, S. Taylor, and M. Toraldo (Eds.), The Organization of Craft Work: Identities, Meanings, and Materiality. Routledge.
  • Ott, R. (2017). “Making fashion things: Embodiment and materiality in bespoke tailoring and cordwaining.” CRASSH “Things” Conference, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, June 16, 2017.
  • Ott, R., & Cukier, W. (2014). “Encountering embodied leadership: Learning from fashion designers.” 30th EGOS Colloquium, Sub-theme 09: Leadership in Art, Design, and Organization, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, July 3–5, 2014.
  • Ott, R., & Cukier, W. (2013). “Materiality and design thinking: Learning from fashion designers.” 8th International Conference in Critical Management Studies, Manchester, UK, July 10–12, 2013.
  • Ott, R., & Cukier, W. (2013). “The gods must be fashion designers.” 29th EGOS Colloquium, Sub-theme 09: Identity in Art, Design, and Organization, Montreal, Canada, July 4–6, 2013.