Martin Grant was born in Melbourne, one of six children, and was drawing dresses before he could write; his kindergarten pictures were already of clothes. His grandmother, a seamstress, taught him to sew. At 15 he left Nunawading High School to pursue fashion, joining the evening-wear designer Desbina Collins.
His rise was rapid. In 1982, still a teenager, he launched his first ready-to-wear line, and he built his reputation through Melbourne's Fashion Design Council, which staged runway shows for emerging and avant-garde designers in the 1980s. In 1988 he won the Cointreau Young Designer award. At 21, despite that early success, he enrolled to study sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts. Two years in, he cut the course short to return to fashion, this time in Europe.
Grant left Australia in 1990, lived for a time in London and then settled in Paris. He began by making garments with the Australian artist Liz Sterling before working under his own name. In 1996 he opened a boutique in the Rue des Rosiers in the Marais, and it was there that his breakthrough came, when Naomi Campbell modelled for him.
He has remained in Paris ever since, building his label from the Marais. His clients have included Naomi Campbell, Cate Blanchett, Emma Stone, Tilda Swinton and Lady Gaga.
At home, his most widely seen work is the Qantas uniform unveiled in April 2013 and worn from 2014 by some 12,600 employees. Grant designed 35 garments for men and women, setting French navy suiting and white shirting against diagonal stripes of ruby red and fuchsia that recall the airline's triangle; he took the logo itself, he said, as his starting point, wanting "something simple and durable" that reflected "the glamour of flying". He followed a line of uniform designers that includes Emilio Pucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Peter Morrissey.
The National Gallery of Victoria first exhibited his work in 2004. In 2025, after Grant donated more than 200 designs from his archive, it mounted a major retrospective.
Grant himself resists the couturier label. "What I do isn't couture, even though this dress has a couture feel," he told the ABC in 2025. "Couture is all hand-made, this is still ready to wear, with a couture feel and hand to it." Half of the 200 pieces he gave the gallery appeared in the retrospective, joined by some 40 more brought from his Paris archive.
Grant's career traces a path many Australian designers have followed and few have sustained: an early start in Melbourne's independent scene, followed by decades as an independent couturier-minded designer in Paris.
The 2025 retrospective, Martin Grant, ran at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from 28 March 2025 to 26 January 2026 and was the largest of his career, tracing more than four decades from Melbourne in the mid-1980s to the re-establishment of his label in Paris in the early 1990s and his latest collections. The gallery describes his work as a reinterpretation of wardrobe classics, "recalibrating historical silhouettes and period references" with a refined command of structure and volume, each garment built in a direct relationship to the body as sculptural form and finished with techniques drawn from bespoke tailoring and couture. Beyond Naomi Campbell, his clients have included his muses Cate Blanchett and Lee Radziwill, as well as Juliette Binoche, Rebel Wilson and Lady Gaga. The accompanying NGV book, with new scholarship by curator Katie Somerville and an afterword by former Vogue Australia editor Marion Hume, sold out.