Fashion
Martin Grant is probably the most successful Australian fashion designer you’ve never heard of – a retrospective at the NGV is about to change that. By Lucianne Tonti.
Martin Grant: Australian fashion’s quiet achiever
Martin Grant may be one of the most successful fashion designers in Australian history, but he is not a household name. He is the “gentle character” who boutique owner Christine Barro met on the dance floor at Melbourne’s Inflation when he was 16, and who hid in the nightclub’s office when the police came. That year, he launched his first label. Two decades later, he would turn down opportunities to be the creative director of French fashion houses Céline and Givenchy.
In a career spanning 40 years, Grant, now 59, has perfected making clothes for an era of refined women. High-waisted trousers with soft, fluid pleating designed to be worn with crisp shirts and cropped, tailored jackets. Wrap dresses with knee-length floating A-line skirts. Double-breasted peacoats with three-quarter raglan sleeves in plush wool. These are clothes for ladies who carry purses, match their earrings to their bracelets and know the power of a low heel.
These clothes will be on display at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Ian Potter Centre in the first major retrospective of the Melbourne-born, Paris-based designer’s work, from the end of this month to January 26, 2026. With about 100 pieces drawn from the NGV collection and 40 loans from Grant’s personal archive, the exhibition displays garments from the last 30 years of his career, including collections that appeared on the official schedule of the French fashion industry’s governing body, the Fédération Française de la Haute Couture et de la Mode. The retrospective will not include the hot pink, red and navy uniforms he designed for Qantas in 2013.
Barro’s highly curated two-storey Melbourne boutique, Christine – hidden upstairs at the Paris end of Collins Street – is now the exclusive outlet for Grant’s garments in Australia. “Everything is a sculpture,” she says as she shows me through the collection. “He really understands the structure of the human form and clients are totally blown away with the quality of his fabrics.”
Grant’s designs are worn by actors Cate Blanchett, Emma Stone and Tilda Swinton. In 2015, socialite Lee Radziwill – the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy and one of the aforementioned ladies – wrote of Grant in The New York Times that “his talent lies in making coats and jackets that never feel trendy because he understands and respects line, proportion and simplicity … how lucky I am that we remain the closest friends”.
Grant grew up in Blackburn, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, and launched his first label as a teenager in the early 1980s. Under the mentorship of fashion designer Desbina Collins, he worked from a studio at Stalbridge Chambers on Little Collins Street, a creative hub of musicians, fashion magazines, models and artists. He began to present his collections regularly at fashion parades staged by the Fashion Design Council, a non-profit organisation set up by the Victorian government.
Speaking to me from his home in Arles, in the south of France, Grant – whose affability is famous among fashion circles – is warm and disarmingly curious. He is also clear about the path he took to success. He recalls those early days with great affection. “It was a fantastic time in Melbourne because it was the beginning of independent designers having a platform.
“On the one hand, it was very loose. On the other hand, the collections were very much about each designer’s personality.”
After putting the label on pause to study sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts, Grant moved to London in 1990. There he worked for the Japanese designer Koji Tatsuno, who counts Julien Macdonald and Alexander McQueen among his protégés. It wasn’t long before Grant found himself in Paris. He began working under his own name and, in 1996, opened his first boutique on Rue des Rosiers in the Marais district, just a few blocks from the location of his atelier today. It was from this boutique that his career accelerated.
In 1999, Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley – Grant’s friend and strong advocate – persuaded the supermodel Naomi Campbell to walk in Grant’s autumn/winter runway. It was staged in the small boutique, with no hair stylist, no make-up artist and no fee. The press generated by photos of Campbell in Grant’s red wool Joan of Arc sheath dress put the brand on the radar of the New York department store Barneys, which became Grant’s first major client and would go on to make him creative director of its own collection. Offers from luxury houses followed but Grant declined, not wanting to give up his relative anonymity and quality of life. This same instinct led him to stop staging runway shows in 2016, in favour of intimate presentations that allowed more meaningful interactions with clients, press and buyers.
“There was already the history of McQueen and Galliano and Marc Jacobs, who were the first of those designers to head into those brands,” says Grant. “I could see it was moving quite fast and they were exhausted by it. For me, it was about not wanting to completely hand over my life to another brand and I was quite happy working with the people that I was working with.”
Those people include the four men who own the family-run factory on the outskirts of Paris that has produced everything for Grant for at least 30 years. “We started off pretty much at the same time and grew up together,” he tells me. “Over the years, I’ve trained them, they’ve trained me, and now it’s such a fluid way of working. They’re fantastic. Their quality is beautiful.”
This is evident from the collections on display in Barro’s boutique. The fabrics – all of which are European deadstock – embody an other-worldly glamour. A matching shirt and trouser set made from a silver silk blend is so light it moves like water. Grant’s signature, the peacoat, is made from a merino wool with the fineness of cashmere, only denser. The denim jacket with a balloon sleeve – another trademark – is made from a brushed cotton so soft it could be flannel. Barro is wearing a shirt from the “Martin Grant for Christine” collaboration in navy, and the cotton twill is practically weightless.
“The clothes have just been evolving constantly and that’s what a good designer does,” Barro says.
For Grant, the evolution of his design seems to be in its final stage. He used the time off during the pandemic to sort through his archive – an exercise that culminated in a donation of 200 pieces to the NGV and led neatly to the retrospective, which follows the gallery’s smaller exhibition of his work 20 years ago.
“I’ve kind of synthesised everything. I’ve pared everything back to a classic collection, a classic wardrobe,” he says. “I feel I don’t need to change them anymore. So, I just change the colours and the fabrics.” Working this way means he can spend more time with his partner in Arles and less at his atelier in Paris, managing a work-life balance that often eludes the world’s most talented creative directors.
Katie Somerville, the NGV’s senior curator of fashion and textiles, describes it as a radical act. “By not taking the next opportunity and constantly re-forming himself, he’s actually maintained a sense of purpose,” she says. “It’s the quiet achiever story, isn’t it?”
This article was amended on March 27, 2025, to correct the spelling of Christine Barro’s name.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 19, 2025 as "The quiet achiever".
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