How a teenage drop-out went on to dress the world’s most famous women

He was ridiculously young. Fifteen, 16, 19, clubbing with the cool crowd, running his own fashion label renowned for its forensic grasp of couture crafts, its modern take on Dior-esque glamour. He was already all about flattering cuts, sharp feminine proportions, controlled draping and graceful kinetic effects. Didn’t like colour much, barely any patterns either; he didn’t want to distract from the pure forms, perfect silhouettes.

Imagine. So mature. And still just a slip of a lad.

Even now, Melbourne-born, Paris-based designer Martin Grant, 58, fresh from distilling 40-odd years of his life and work into a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, seems pleasantly puzzled by his own precocious teen self.

“I’m kind of shocked that I was doing what I was doing so young,” he says. “I do remember people being surprised.”

Grant is a warm, easy talker, on screen from Paris, where he’s been based since the late 1980s. These days he ping-pongs between his Paris apartment and atelier, and the home and lush garden he shares with his partner in the south of France, and of course, Melbourne, most recently to work on the NGV exhibition with fashion and textiles curator Katie Somerville.

Dresses from Martin Grant collections in (from left) 2017, 2020 and 2014. Credit: Photos (left and right): Takashi Osato 

It’s the NGV’s second significant exhibition of Grant’s work since 2005, this one triggered by what Somerville calls Grant’s “glorious gift” last year of more than 200 archival garments and a rare nest-egg of adjunct materials: look-books, sketches, runway footage, photographs and press clippings, most destined for the exhibition.

“The name Martin Grant is not in the general public’s wider understanding of a [designer] who’s chased fashion stardom,” Somerville says. “He’s never been interested in playing that game ... He sees himself more as someone who’s making clothes, beautifully, in extraordinary fabrics, clothes that people will hold on to for 30 years.”

Only occasionally has Grant stepped out of his atelier into a more complicated business model: a decade designing private label collections for the now defunct New York retail fashion bastion Barneys, for example, and back home, his 2014 commission to design Qantas’ chic tailored uniforms.

He has famously turned down offers with potential to make him a household name including, in 2004, creative leadership of designer Céline Vipiana’s legacy Parisian fashion house, Celine (established in 1945). His refusal, ostensibly, was not because workloads and KPIs on fashion’s upper luxury echelons can be notoriously soul-sucking either – which they can. It’s that Grant has a vision and simply, stubbornly, sticks to it.

“There’s a thread that has run right through my work from the very beginning,” he says. “One aspect is that couture sensibility you see, about the handwork and the number of people that work on a garment ... it’s also the references I’ve had since a very early age; the ’50s, through the ’60s ... and then there’s that sculptural thing that I think is sort of innate ... the way I work in three dimensions; the form and silhouette, volume and structure; they’re what my work is about as opposed to decoration.”

From left: Dress and petticoat from 2017; shirt and trousers from 2019.Credit:  Photos: Takashi Osato, Daniel Roche

His output is spectacularly non-spectacular: impeccably cut edgy fashion most seductive to connoisseurs, less so to lovers of flashy global logos. “It’s for women that love to express their personal style, not ‘Look what I’ve got on my back’,” quips local fashion legend and retailer Christine Barro. She is the only bricks-and-mortar supplier of Grant’s ready-to-wear collections in Australia and firmly believes, as many do, that he is a fashion genius. “He’s stuck to his DNA, his signature; the cut, the fabrications ... and people are just blown away by his understanding of the human form,” she says.

“You have to mention his fabulous raglan sleeve. It is so flattering, so size-forgiving ... you could almost just have a wardrobe of his coats; they make you feel so present.”

The mechanics of Grant’s “DNA” are most present in his coats, and Somerville demonstrates how it manifests across his oeuvre through the four upper-floor rooms of the exhibition. All the sculptural forms, from quietly chic to the controlled operatic volumes that have thrummed through his work since the 1980s are represented, from the classic French caban or pea coat, the archetypal trench, the Victorian-esque crinoline-cut tailored coat that is both faintly gothic and reminiscent of Dior’s New Look but, inarguably, a la Martin Grant.

An early design by Martin Grant.

Somerville even took a stab at locating Grant’s creative origins with a matrix wall of his kindergarten paintings. Girl after girl dabbed out in fully foofed crinoline ballgowns. “They’re all very princessy aren’t they?” Grant says, laughing. “And very colourful, which is unusual for me.” He doesn’t remember painting them, “but I do remember an old record of Bach’s music with a ballroom scene on the cover and women in crinolines ... I was just so intrigued by a world where women would wear these gowns.”

By his teens, Grant’s dream of swishing crinolines was intersected by something wilder, edgier, and more compelling: “I remember I was so hungry for something ... more urban, more cultural ... I was so into the music scene, the whole punk scene, all that was happening in [Melbourne]; people were dressing up, crazy, nightclubs ... I just wanted to be part of what was going on.”

It was the early 1980s and Melbourne’s punkish counter-culture was boiling over, making a name for the city as an offbeat hotspot of The New in art, design, music, magazines, filmmaking, fashion, nightlife.

Grant dropped out of Blackburn High School and headed for the revolution (admittedly only a 25-cent train ride away). He left behind an idyllic childhood spent “making things, doing things” in the Robin Boyd house where he’d lived with his mum, a teacher, dad, a history professor and three sisters who were cheerful models of his earliest fashion experiments; his grandmother, an accomplished seamstress, lived close enough to pass on some of her elegant intuition and practical skills.

Grant’s plunge into the socio-cultural phenomenon of 1980s Melbourne was also his first bout of big-fish-small-pond celebrity. “Such a frenzied time,” he remembers. “I was meeting all these artists, musicians, fashion people ... and I was the youngest in that whole nightclub and music scene.”

Between Inflation and Collins Street’s Stalbridge Chambers (known as Strawbridge), the labyrinthine building where many of the city’s cultural disruptors had their studios, Grant remembers falling into deep friendships and the habit of collaborating with artists and other creatives that would become a natural adjunct to his life and work.

Martin Grant among his designs at the NGV retrospective exhibition this week.Credit: Polly Borland

One of many friends flying in for the exhibition opening is Los Angeles-based photographer Polly Borland, who was commissioned by the NGV to create a new portrait of Grant, above, echoing an early one she took in 1985 (pictured at top). She remembers meeting the “innocent boy” with the “ferocious sort of creative energy”, when he was just 15 and her own career was rocketing in her early 20s.

“We became pretty good friends, pretty much straight away,” she recalls. “This very gifted young person. He was quite precocious; he had this innate confidence and a sort of unstoppable creativity that was just joyful. He’d say he learned to sew from his grandmother but everything else was just innate: this technical ability he had and his dedication to the craft and the quality of everything he was doing ... [later] he went off and learned from a tailor how to make a suit properly – such a complicated thing – but everything he did, he always kept developing and learning.”

Borland remembers Grant as almost childlike in a world of wildly creative adults but able to establish a rapport with virtually anyone. “He seemed so young, without any significant adult presence in his own life, but also fiercely independent,” she says. “I actually felt quite motherly towards him at first, which probably wasn’t good because we were pretty heavily into partying!”

Borland and Grant became inseparable, riding their bikes (neither could drive) from project to project, party to party, club to club. “We had this communication; this creativity and the love of beautiful things,” she says. “I was doing portraits for Vogue and The Age … but I was also constantly photographing him, and we were also doing our own fashion shoots using friends, you know, as models; Martin styling everything. He had just a gorgeous eye. We just loved what we did.”

Eventually Borland moved to London and on to an international reputation for portrait and fashion photography. Grant stayed.

By age 20, not surprisingly, he began to feel something akin to burn-out. “It was such an intense four years,” he says. “Which was great but, also, quite daunting ... I kind of needed to pull back ... Do I want to be doing this forever?”

He enrolled to study sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts “and I realised actually, that’s what I’d been doing in fashion all along, the same kind of sculptural form”.

After two years of VCA he was ready to move on – first to London and then Paris; he picked up offers with small bright brands in the market for his miraculous self-taught pattern-making skills (the result of what Somerville calls his “amazing maths brain”).

Eventually, he opened his first tiny atelier in the Marais and began accumulating connoisseurs, mentors, admirers, creative collaborators and, most gratifyingly, an international clique of paying clients.

Polly Borland, Portrait of Cate Blanchett, 1999.Credit: © Courtesy of Polly Borland

The late Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley was one of the first, describing Grant’s designs as “precise, sharp and full of grace”. He introduced Grant to Naomi Campbell, who modelled for him, and circles of fashionistocrats who befriended him. Luxury shoe designer Christian Louboutin lent his collection for Grant’s Paris shows. Renowned French artist Sarah Moon immortalised Grant’s work in photographs of extraordinary, ethereal beauty (one, La Robe Rouge, 2010, features in the exhibition). Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy’s “even more stylish” sister and one of Truman Capote’s iconic “swans”, became a loyal client and close confidante.

Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Juliette Binoche, Emma Stone, Blake Lively, Isabella Rossellini, Megan Duchess of Sussex, Queen Rania of Jordan, Sandra Bullock and Lady Gaga have all worn Martin Grant.

“I don’t have a specific type of woman that I design for,” he says. “Women are very varied! The thing my friends have in common is they’re strong personalities [with] strong personal style, strong opinions. So, often when I’m working on something I might think, yes, ‘This will be great for So-and-So’ but when I’m working on a whole collection, it’s a mix of all the women that I know.”

Picking through the NGV archive with Somerville for the exhibition, Grant found himself drawn to the “showpieces” he’s created in 40-odd years of designing. (A case in point is the exhibition’s marvellous show plate, a lolly-pink silk taffeta gown photographed on model Susie Bick by Polly Borland.) These are the more extravagant designs used to visually spark up a runway line-up of simpler forms with subtler details that exude couture craft and ingenuity but tend to have a lower visual key.

“What I actually love most is the commercial pieces,” says Grant. “I love to hear about the pieces I make that people wear every day, my classic coats and suits and tailoring ... I love it when they tell me: ‘I’ve been wearing this for years and I love it’.”

Martin Grant opens at NGV Australia on March 28.