Dressed for the height of success
Paris-based Australian designer Martin Grant has risen to the challenge of fashioning a new, distinguished look for Qantas’ 2500 pilots. Gemma Nisbet reports.
When Australian fashion designer Martin Grant was at Perth Airport recently, flying up to Broome for a holiday after a short stay in the city, he received a warm reception from the Qantas staff, who were eager to tell him how much they liked the chic uniform he designed for them two years ago.
Indeed, the Melbourne-raised, Paris-based designer — whose celebrity clients include Cate Blanchett, Juliette Binoche, Tilda Swinton and Cameron Diaz — says that such experiences have become commonplace since the uniform was launched in April 2013.
“I feel like I know every Qantas employee now; I’ve got a certain closeness to them,” he says. “When they recognise me, it’s nice because they’re not too shy to come up and talk to me. I get lots of nice direct feedback.”
Grant says it’s particularly rewarding to see the uniform — which was inspired by the airline’s classic logo and includes navy suiting with touches of red and fuchsia plus a trench coat, scarf and trilby hat — worn en masse.
“It’s fantastic, actually, because it is a uniform,” he says.
“That’s one of the things when I was designing it — to have a uniformity about it and imagine it in large groups of people, and the visibility of it. It’s great because when I see it, I feel it works like that.”
Now Grant will turn his creative talents to designing a new, modern uniform for Qantas’ 2500 domestic, regional and international pilots, aiming to produce something that is “comfortable, stylish and, most of all, distinguished”.
“Given that Qantas is such a premium carrier, that for me is really important — that they look very distinguished and smart,” he explains. “The other thing is that pilots have enormous respect. They’re one of the top-five most respected professions and I think uniform has a lot to do with that as well.”
Speaking to Travel this week from Sydney, Grant says he is at the research stage of the process, hosting focus groups to learn as much as possible about what the pilots want from their new uniforms and the demands of their working environment.
“While I’m here I’m talking to as many pilots as possible,” he says. “I’ve just spent the morning in the simulators, I actually flew an A330. It was incredible — quite amazing and so realistic.
“I had two pilots with me who talked me through it, because it’s important for me to understand the whole environment, the whole job. And it was an enormous amount of fun as well.”
Qantas’ pilots have been wearing their current uniform for more than 10 years and the airline says it hopes to roll out the new design sometime next year.
