Dr Ruitong Cui

Overview

Dr Ruitong Cui is a Lecturer in Fashion Marketing and Strategic Communication at City St George’s, University of London. Over the past five years she has taught at undergraduate, postgraduate and MBA levels across fashion marketing, fashion business, entrepreneurship and research methods. The student learning experience is central to her approach: research-led and explicitly student-centred, positioning students as active participants in knowledge creation and building intellectual ownership through meaningful connections between theory and practice.

Those connections draw on industry as much as research. Ruitong has worked in luxury retail, PR and events, and marketing, with companies including Louis Vuitton, Chanel and We Are Village. She is co-founder of Overdressed Mag, an independent publication exploring fashion through the lens of psychology, and a board member and Vice-President Designate of the Geneva Agape Foundation, a non-profit working on ethics, values-based entrepreneurship and culture. This grounding allows her to situate learning within wider trajectories of industry change and to encourage students to engage critically with its opportunities and risks.

Her research focuses on digital innovation and management strategy in fashion, with an emphasis on how technological, social and market change is reshaping the industry — particularly the contemporary implications of the digital economy, AI and the wider adoption of emerging technologies across the sector. She works with qualitative methods that surface lived experience along fashion’s global value chain, with particular attention to the industry’s social and ethical dimensions. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections and presented at international conferences, including the Academy of Marketing, the British Academy of Management and the Global Fashion Conference, where she received the Best Innovation Research Award in 2022. She also speaks to non-academic audiences at events including Pint of Science.

A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Ruitong is committed to inclusive teaching that recognises diverse learner backgrounds and supports transferable learning beyond individual modules and was nominated for Outstanding Teaching Assistant in 2023. She completed her PhD in Fashion Marketing and Management at the University of Manchester, and before joining City St George’s, she taught at the University of Manchester and Ravensbourne University London.

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Manchester, United Kingdom, September 2021 - July 2025
• BSc(Hons) Psychology of Fashion, University of the Arts London, United Kingdom, September 2018 - July 2021

Employment

• Lecturer in Fashion Marketing and Strategic Communication, City, University of London, United Kingdom, August 2026 - present
• Lecturer in Fashion Business & Entrepreneurship, Ravensbourne University London, United Kingdom, July 2025 - July 2026
• Teaching Assistant in Fashion Business & Technology, University of Manchester, United Kingdom, October 2021 - December 2024

Awards

• University of Manchester (2023). Outstanding Teaching Assistant
• Global Fashion Conference (2022). Best Innovation Research

Languages

Chinese (Mandarin) (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review) and English (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review)

Publications by category