Five Minutes With Martin Grant, Esteemed Australian Womenswear Designer

Martin Grant is the sort of fashion designer Australians can’t help but want to claim. The Melbourne-born, Paris-based founder of the eponymous label is quietly self-assured. At 16, he released his first ready-to-wear collection. More than 40 years later, he’s still going.

Grant’s illustrious career harks back to the heyday of fashion, back when his friend and mentor, the late André Leon Talley, convinced supermodel Naomi Campbell to spontaneously model in his first runway show.

Now, Grant has been honoured with a retrospective exhibition at the NGV. There are close to 100 works drawn from the NGV Collection, alongside more than 40 loans from Grant's personal archive and private collections featured in what’s now the largest public collection of his pieces.

We speak with Grant about this exhibition, now in its final week, and the process of combing through decades of material.

These responses have been edited for length and clarity.

How did this NGV exhibition come about?

It really started during Covid. I started going through my archives in Paris that had been put away for the last 20-something years and I started editing them. I contacted the NGV, [curator] Katie Somerville and [NGV director] Tony Ellwood, to ask if they would accept a gift from me. And so they said “yes”.

We started the process of selecting [and] curating a selection of pieces from my archives, of which we ended up with about 200 pieces, gifted to them probably a year and a half ago. Then from that point, they actually proposed the idea of having an exhibition to start showing the pieces.

How did it feel going through your past collections? I read that you had artworks in there from when you were four years old.

The artworks weren’t actually part of that archive. They were in my mother’s archive; she has her own archives in our old family house. It was quite a strange experience. I was going back through all of the archives that I had, [mostly] from the Paris years, so starting from probably ’91 or ’92. Some of them were nice surprises. Some of them were less nice surprises, but generally, it was really interesting to see them again. There was a fantastic selection of things that I rediscovered.

Were there any common threads that you found with your earlier pieces and to what you create now?

A lot, a lot, and that’s the thing, and I think that comes across in this exhibition. That was one of the interesting things looking back at the work – it was actually a lot more diverse than I thought. There’s quite a lot of diversity in it, but you still do definitely see a thread running through, whether that be in the shape, in the colour, [or] just in the way that I approach things in a very sculptural, par[ed] back [way]. There are some very extravagant evening pieces, for example, but there’s still a certain pared-back element to them.

What are you most excited for people to see in the exhibition?

I guess it’s to see a whole history of work. I think it’s interesting to see an evolution – or, like you say, a common thread that runs through – and see a certain development. For me, looking at [some of] the rooms where the collections are mixed up, it’s actually quite hard to tell which period they’re from. There is a fairly timeless quality about them, which is interesting.

I really enjoyed the piece that your friend and journalist Marion Hume wrote for The Age. It was interesting to me because the business of fashion is typically about growth, but she said you’re not winding down the business, you’re “just not actively amping it up”. So I’m curious, what does success look like to you?

What is my idea of success? For me personally, it’s to be able to work and do the things that interest [me] and have a reasonable lifestyle, as well as a quality of life and not to be completely dictated by schedules and calendars, which is something that the fashion industry is very much based on.

It’s like farming. You know, we go by seasons so you have to work. When the sun shines, you have to make hay. So it’s nice for me to actually step a little bit aside from that and have a bit more free time than what I’ve had in the past, where we were doing four, up to 10 collections a year. Now I’ve really pared that back down, and so it means that I’ve got a much better quality of life. And I think that also there’s a certain stability to the work, which I like as well.

To that definition, would you call yourself successful?

Getting there.