The Melbourne teen tearaway now feted in Paris – and the NGV

This story is part of the March 22 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

Simplicity is difficult to do well, whether it’s an outfit or an omelette. The perfect example of the latter slides from pan to plate, accompanied by the tangy, dressed leaves of a spinach salad. “I’m not going to do some sort of ‘feast and fancy table setting’ just because you’re here,” laughs Melburnian designer Martin Grant, one of my dearest friends. And who needs more than we’ve already got? A table outside, an embroidered cloth, rustic bread, local French cheese …

Martin lived in Paris for more than three decades, designing for his eponymous fashion label, Martin Grant. But we are not there now. Three years ago, he spotted a for-sale photo online for a traditional Provençal farmhouse so ridiculously pretty – blue shutters, blond stone walls, higgledy-piggledy terracotta-tiled roof – that he and his life partner, Mustapha Khaddar, jumped on the train to Arles in the country’s deep south, drove just 10 minutes outside the city, viewed the “Mas” (farmhouse) and bought it. When you look at it side-on, it’s surprisingly skinny – just like Martin.

I’ve stayed here before in the heat of summer. But not in winter, which – coming from London’s icy sleet – I was expecting to be warmer. I’m just going to put it out here now: I did not intend to be photographed for this story with Martin while not wearing his label. I packed his shirts. But it turned out to be sweater weather. I left behind my navy felted wool Martin Grant coat because it’s heavy to travel in. So I find myself being photographed with the designer, walking around his new “home town” in my ancient, lightweight mac. I guess there’s a lesson there. But hey, we’re not models, we’re old mates. I’m 62 and Martin is 56, so you get what you get.

The traditional Provençal farmhouse that proved irresistible to Martin Grant and his life partner, Mustapha KhaddarCredit: James Reeve

What Martin and I get from each other is constant conversation. We holiday together, during which Mustapha and my husband, Pete, look on bemused that we never stop talking. That’s slightly tricky today because we have to shout over the whine of a chainsaw. I’d better explain. We arrived last night from Paris, the train pulling into Arles under a van Gogh starry, starry sky (Vincent was one among many artists attracted to this unique part of southern France). We reached the Mas to find a huge tree felled by the mistral wind. A local farmer, Jean Paul, is busy dismantling it. (And will come by later with a barrow of logs.)

Jean Paul was the first person Martin and Mustapha met when they moved in. This elderly farmer rattled up on a 1970s motorbike. “He was wearing double denim, said a quick hello, then left,” Martin recalls. “So we thought, ‘A couple of poofs turn up from Paris. One’s Australian. One’s an Arab. That’s that.’ But no. Ten minutes later, he came back with fresh eggs and a huge bunch of wattle, which the French call mimosa, because he knew it was an Australian native.”

Jean Paul has continued to bring bunches as soon as the wattle is in bloom, and he and his wife, Monique, have become firm friends. “They’re not jaded. They are very curious about everything. They’d looked me up, and he said, ‘I hear Naomi Campbell has modelled for you.’ ”

I was there when the supermodel walked in a teeny show for Martin in 1999. By then, Martin and I had known each other for several years. We can’t remember when we first met, we just collided, the way you do in Paris fashion circles. I became a customer because Martin has that rare skill of being able to drape and tailor from bird size to plus size. He doesn’t offer that made-to-measure service any more. It was time-consuming and not central to profits. But I’m still irked I didn’t get to bulk-order before he closed his private order book.

The author enjoying lunch with Khaddar and Grant in the garden.Credit: James Reeve

To be clear, he is not winding down the business, he is just not actively amping it up. He still commutes to Paris by train a couple of times each season, still puts out a chic collection twice a year, still has his prized wholesale customers around the world, such as Christine Barro of Christine on Collins in Melbourne. But his move south collided with the decision of his head of atelier of 20 years deciding to move north, back to Brittany.

It also came after a potentially life-changing offer of serious investment. Who, and how much, remains confidential, but let’s say, we’re real friends so what I know, I know. Had he said yes, he could have had a manor house rather than a farmhouse. “Imagine all the house guests; it’s enough now when it’s two at a time,” he says, laughing. “I thought I wanted it, then I realised I didn’t. It makes me realise I wanted a different way of life.”

Martin grew up in Blackburn, a leafy suburb on the edge of Melbourne, in a glass house designed by the architect Robin Boyd. He’s the son of a professor and a school teacher, the brother to sisters, and a one-time teenage tearaway. He frequented nightclubs when underage, quit school at 15 and was coerced back only to fulfil the legal requirement to be 16 before he could leave. “This is so at odds with the person I know,” I say. “Tell me more.”

“More wine?” he replies and reveals nothing.

He was well known as a designer in Melbourne by the time he hit 20, having won the prestigious Cointreau Young Designer of the Year Award. So he went to the Victorian College of the Arts to study sculpture, moved to London when he was 23, travelled to Paris, then stayed. He only started returning to Australia regularly in 2014, when he became the uniform designer for Qantas. His life’s work is being celebrated with a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, which opens on March 28, and runs until next January. I tell him he’s way too young to have a retrospective. He tells me we are not getting any younger. “Remind me why we are still friends?” I say.

His clothes are utterly timeless. He’s not about embellishment, sensation or fancy, but rather structure that can stand up to scrutiny.

The exhibition will feature 250 pieces, ranging across four decades. This has presented the exhibitors with something of a challenge. As he went through his archive, which was stored carefully, yet somewhat randomly, in boxes at the small artisanal factory in Clichy-sous-Bois, just outside the Paris city limits, Martin would come across a garment and ping me a photo. “Any idea of the year?” My fashion chronology is pretty good. But I’d text back, “No clue.” His clothes are sustainable in the best possible way in that they are utterly timeless. He’s not about embellishment, sensation or fancy, but rather structure that can stand up to scrutiny, even in a museum.

The author with Grant in the stylish farmhouse.Credit: James Reeve

But time is of the essence today. Lunch done, we need to get going. Summer is for lingering at the table long into the afternoon, today’s winter temperature is perfect for playing tourist. In less than 10 minutes we have driven from his home into one of the loveliest cities in all of France, combining the ancient, the old and the new. Arles is alive with the sound of jackhammers as its statuesque grand townhouses are renovated, due to a flood of money from the Swiss art patron and pharmaceutical heiress, Maja Hoffmann. She owns hotels here, an enormous complex of old railway sheds which are now art spaces, and – controversially – Luma Arles, a shiny tower
housing a contemporary arts centre designed by “starchitect” Frank Gehry, and far from loved by all. We decide her greatest contribution to the town is in fact the supremely stylish, French-meets-Japanese patisserie. The twist on the classic tarte tatin is a taste sensation.

Creative people flock to Arles in July and August for the Rencontres d’Arles, probably the world’s leading annual celebration of photography. Arles is jammed in summer, the atmosphere electric. “It’s great, yet there’s a really interesting community down here year round,” says Martin. “You can kind of step in and out of it. So it’s not like in Paris, where you feel you’re constantly surrounded. You’re not in everyone’s pocket.”

The Romans built Arles. It has an amphitheatre which is a mini-me of Rome’s Colosseum. It has a forum. It has an aqueduct. Arles sits on the edge of the Camargue, the largest wetlands in France, an extraordinarily raw, wild region of white horses and pink flamingos. The Camargue has its own traditional dress, which you still see worn: women in skirts to the ground and lace fichu at the neck, men dressed somewhat like cowboys. The sign of the Camargue – the croix de Camargue – is a heart over an anchor that represents farmers, fishermen, bulls and faith. Martin’s nod to living here is to use it as a wattle-yellow intarsia motif on a navy cashmere jumper.

Supermodel Naomi Campbell with Martin Grant outside the designer’s Paris boutique in 1999.Credit: Thierry Chomel

In fact, Martin is the second fashion designer I’ve worn with an Arles connection. I came into the fashion world in the late 1980s, when a star was rising by the name of Christian Lacroix. Lacroix was born here, and he brought vivid colour and the iconography of the Camargue to Paris. I was smitten. I saved for a navy polka-dot silk shirt. I wish I still had it.

We reach the cloister of Saint-Trophime, a remarkable UNESCO World Heritage-listed, Romanesque edifice, which we both admit we know because it’s the coolest exhibition space of Rencontres d’Arles – as in, those 12th-century builders knew how to block out the heat. Martin can’t wait to show me his most recent discovery (hiding in plain sight since about 1390). Among the stone carvings of patron saints is one chap accessorised with what looks distinctly like a Louis Vuitton cross-body bag. “A mere six centuries before they invented the monogram,” he says.

Back at the house, I admire a beautiful photo by Gilles Bensimon of Lee Radziwill, Martin and Mustapha’s friend of many years who died in February 2019. Lee was the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, famously elegant and a Martin Grant client. The late André Leon Talley of US Vogue, who introduced Martin to Naomi Campbell (hence her modelling free for an independent designer), was also the conduit to Radziwill. “Lee and I just got on,” Martin says. “André pointed out, when he realised how much we were seeing each other, ‘You are both exactly the same size physically.’ There was something very similar about us … we were compatible …”

“Then we shouldn’t be,” I fire back, as I stretch out my limbs – twice the length of his – on the new cream sofa. Almost everything else in the house is old: flea market items sourced through the years and familiar to me, such as the dining table, an old desk from the 1950s that used to be the staff lunch table in Paris. It’s surrounded by chairs, which are 1960s copies of a famous design.

“I’m not a label freak,” says Martin. “I like them as I know they’re fakes. But they’re fakes from the period.” Positioned throughout are gloriously wonky baskets by the Tjanpi weavers, a collective of Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara women from Australia’s central and western deserts. I collect these, too. There’s something similar about us after all.

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