The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) announced on Friday (5 July), that celebrated Paris-based Australian fashion designer Martin Grant has gifted more than 200 designs from his own archive to the gallery.

Grant is known globally for his reinterpretation of wardrobe classics, with a particular flair for sculptural form and volume.

The gift encompasses more than three decades of his career, with designs spanning from the early 1990s, when he established his label in Paris, through to his acclaimed autumn-winter 2019 collection, and more recent pieces. It also includes a large number of archival press clippings, runway footage, sketches and photographs. 

The gift will form the basis of an exhibition surveying Grant’s body of work, to be held at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. His work was last displayed in the NGV 2005 exhibition, Martin Grant: Paris, the designer’s first major Australian retrospective. 

Read: Exhibition review: Africa Fashion, NGV

Who is Martin Grant?

Martin Grant began his career as a young fashion designer in Melbourne in the early 1980s. After seven years of successfully running his own fashion label in Melbourne, he moved to the UK in 1990. While studying sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts, he worked for two London-based fashion houses before making the decision to move to Paris in 1992 where he re-established his own label.

In 2003 Grant was invited to join Barney’s New York’s as Artistic Director of the Barney’s Private Label, a tenure he held for 10 years and in 2014 he designed uniforms for Qantas.   

Grant’s clients have included his muses Cate Blanchett and Lee Radziwill, as well as Juliette Binoche, Emmanuelle Devos, Tilda Swinton, Blake Lively, Cameron Diaz, Kate Hudson, Emma Stone, Eva Longoria, Her Highness Sheikha Moza and Queen Rania of Jordan.