Tao(Runtao) Xiao
Tao is a China-born, New York–based researcher, strategic and social designer whose work interrogates the unseen mechanisms of the global fashion industry. His academic and creative inquiry centers on the ideological contradictions between sustainability, design, and institutional power. Tao’s work takes an anthropological approach to sustainable fashion, consumer behavior, aesthetic hegemony, climate impact, social integration, cultural incorporation, and systemic marginalization.
As a member of Gen Z who grew up during a period of economic upswing and multicultural embrace under the optimistic rhetoric of globalization, Tao has become increasingly critical of the structures that shape creative labor. He often reflects on his time at an art and design school, where hundreds of students were taught to become creators for an industry fundamentally misaligned with ecological and ethical futures. It was there, within a curriculum designed to produce designers—not systems thinkers—that Tao first encountered the limits of fashion education: how the very students expected to “design for change” had already internalized the values of an unsustainable system.
Tao’s creative and academic practice is shaped by his position between systems—between design and research, and between disciplines that rarely speak to one another. His work does not begin with a fixed category like ‘fashion design’ or ‘sustainability,’ but from the structural absence of serious discourse around fashion within academic and policy institutions. Fashion is central to global consumption, labor, and environmental impact, yet remains marginal in scholarly research and public governance. This contradiction defines much of Tao’s direction: he is not simply studying fashion, but studying why fashion is excluded from critical systems thinking.
His approach integrates visual work and research as parallel forms of inquiry, not separate practices. He engages with installation, critical design, and media not to present outcomes, but to test methods of communicating what sustainability and systems critique often fail to represent in language alone. His work is less about proposing alternatives and more about identifying the structural barriers that prevent fashion—and the people who study or work in it—from being taken seriously.
Tao’s work is informed by discomfort as much as by expertise. He navigates the contradictions of being a Chinese creative trained in Western institutions, a designer turned researcher, a visual thinker working in policy-adjacent frameworks. These in-betweens are not flaws in his practice, but its method. The tools of design, theory, and communication are not endpoints in his work, but entry points to address broader systemic omissions across sustainability, education, and policy. They allow him to speak across disciplines, translate between modes, and critique the systems that once trained him to remain silent.