Dressing Naomi Campbell, Cate Blanchett and a show inside a skirt: Martin Grant’s 40-year career – in pictures

‘This is very early on,’ Martin Grant says. ‘I’d wear the tie … often, so that people would take me a bit more seriously because I was only 19.’ He says he was photographed by artist Polly Borland, a close friend and collaborator: ‘We were always together.’ The picture was taken at Grant’s studio on Melbourne’s Little Collins Street. He is standing in front of a Jenny Watson painting, titled This Year’s Fashion, which the artist gave him in exchange for clothing. ‘And it’s painted in the colours of the collections that I’d just been working on.’

Katie Somerville, senior curator of fashion and textiles at the NGV, says working on Grant’s retrospective exhibition was a more collaborative process than she is used to. She says Grant’s ‘very refined and very clear understanding of the … sculptural quality of what he’s creating’ leant itself well to the process of mapping out an exhibition. The core of the 100-garment show is formed by a sizeable donation of Grant’s own archives, but ‘there were some pieces that he was not quite ready to let go of. So there are whisperings of the second gift to come.’

Martin Grant and Polly Borland lived together when this photograph was taken, in the park opposite their home in Elwood. Tamasine Dale, who designed the hat, also lived with the pair. The model, Sophie Knox, was one of Grant’s friend’s sisters, and ‘probably did the makeup herself’. Knox is wearing a slash-back coat, which was a common theme in Grant’s work at the time. ‘So there was a slightly punk element to these quite classic pieces of clothing.’

The scene pictured here ‘happened very quickly, and it did kind of launch my career’, Grant says. ‘You’ll see André Leon Talley to the right of Naomi [Campbell], and he was my champion at that point.’ Talley encouraged Grant to do the show in his ‘matchbox’ shop in Paris, and invited key editors. ‘I said I wasn’t ready. He said: “Just do it.”’ At the last minute, Talley arranged for Campbell to model. The show had already started when she arrived, so she ducked behind the dressing curtain, ‘stripped off’, put on her dress, ‘and she came straight out’.

Cate Blanchett had just starred in the 1998 film Elizabeth when this image was taken by Polly Borland. ‘I’d met her maybe a couple of years before that at the Cannes film festival,’ Grant says. Borland photographed her for an exhibition she was doing for the National Portrait Gallery in London. ‘And she wore this dress of mine for it, which is called the Joan of Arc dress.’ The dress, alongside the photograph, is on display at Grant’s NGV retrospective.

Ahead of her wedding, Grant’s friend Valentine de Ganay invited a group of artists and designers to interact with the gardens and chateau where the event was taking place. ‘So I decided to dress the statues in the gardens in crinoline petticoats. And this was the largest one.’ On display at the NGV, ‘you’ll see it’s the size of a tent. It’s enormous.’ After the exhibition in the garden, ‘I actually used that skirt in the courtyard behind our shop and did a fashion show inside it.’

Drawn by David Downton, ‘probably the best contemporary fashion illustrator in Australia’ by Grant’s estimation, this image of Cate Blanchett was produced for Vogue Australia’s 50th anniversary. The dress Blanchett is wearing is part of the display at the NGV.

The dress featured in this image is also on display at the NGV. ‘In the exhibition, this is kind of one of the winners,’ Grant says. The dress is made from a silk velvet lurex, which is ‘like liquid mercury almost’. While Grant’s designs don’t use many prints, ‘I do use different textures. And I do love a reflective shine.’

Socialite Lee Radziwill became a friend and client after an introduction by André Leon Talley. ‘At the time … I was doing a lot of very fine quilting,’ Grant says. The first jacket Radziwill purchased from him is on show at the NGV. ‘It had those … scallop-shaped panels, and it has a slight padding to it. So there’s a very slight kind of three-dimensional quality to it. Otherwise it’s very, very simple.’

Australian stylist Catherine Baba moved to Paris shortly after Grant and the pair became close friends. In this photo, she is wearing one of Grant’s rare uses of print – in this case, a reprint of a mid-century design. ‘I found an artist who worked very much for Dior and Balenciaga in the 1950s. And I met his great-niece … she had his archives,’ Grant says. ‘I used to buy small pieces of what she had left. And then she gave me the permission to actually have this one reprinted.’

When Grant worked in Melbourne in the 1980s, he was fascinated by crinolines and the Dior new look shape. ‘So there was a lot of high, nipped-in waists and volume in the skirt.’ Grant was working with milliner Tamasine Dale a lot at the time ‘and she was doing a lot of trims for the hats, grosgrain and bows … so I think this evolved through that relationship.’

When Grant originally saw this photograph by Sarah Moon, featuring one of his dresses, he tried to acquire the print. At the time, he couldn’t get it and so he framed a tear sheet of the photo from a magazine instead. ‘Quite a few years later, she came in as a client and wanted to buy a coat,’ he says. He showed her the framed magazine page ‘and then she gifted me her artist proof’. A large-format version of the print has now been acquired by the NGV.

‘Yellow is a colour that I took to later in life,’ Grant says. ‘It used to be my most detested colour.’ More recently, at the urging of a collaborator, ‘I learned to love it. And now it is one of my key punch colours.’ Grant describes this dress as very exaggerated, but at the same time very simple.

Lady Gaga’s appearance in polka dot pants and a matching top happened ‘a little bit unbeknownst to me’, Grant says. Her styling team made a request, ‘then the next day she turned up in this outfit, which was fantastic. And for her, it was a departure because … [it] was quite ladylike and very sort of elegant and sophisticated, not as wild as she usually was. So actually we got quite a lot of press out of it.’

Grant describes this coat as ‘a bit of an engineering feat’ and says it has many elements that are key to his design practice. ‘I’ve always been very fond of … structural collars and capes. And so this is kind of a little mix of the two really.’ The rest of the coat is quite simple with narrow sleeves and a cinching belt, ‘but it has quite a lot of structure inside that really holds it. There’s a shoulder inside there that holds the whole thing up.’

Grant combed through his archives during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, an experience he found ‘overwhelming’. Given the complex considerations involved in storing textiles, he was surprised the clothes had remained in good condition. Ultimately it was a relief to put his archive ‘in good hands’. He says: ‘Now I can relax a little bit.’