“His Kind Of World” – Fashion Guru Grant Whittaker Celebrates 20 Years of Making a Scene

I sit in the lobby of a North Loop hotel.  The space’s high ceiling suggests its original purpose:  over a century before, the structure housed giant, mechanical manure spreaders, threshers, and harvesters.  As the times changed, the space changed, eventually graduating to storing horse carriages, newfangled Rambler touring cars, and (presumably very tall cases of) baking powder.  

This towering past is obscured by the central lobby’s brown wooden knickknacks balancing on brown wooden shelves whose brown, wooden center traps a heatless, hunger-less flame within a glass fire zoo.  I watch the adjacent front door—the building’s current purpose, warehousing humans one night at a time, is in full swing, millers milling about, in and out, to and fro, each dragging wheeled baggage that follows like a grumbling shadow. 

Someone enters, looking like a bold charcoal drawing come to life:  a long, black-and-white trench coat billows like a super-hero’s cape as he moves.  Rhinestones glitter across the coat when he steps into the lobby’s long light.  The coat covers a black shirt traced with white geometric shapes, black track pants graced with a white stripe on the left-most and right-most sides.  The whole ensemble rests on boots laced with a black-and-white snakeskin stripes.  

The someone has a face and head:  trimmed goatee, blue eyes, ‘brows sculpted with Michelangelo-esque precision, all of it topped with a crafted swirl of twice-blonde hair.  The someone exudes…well, it’s not so much attitude as it is a perfect dearth of deference.  He’s a man who isn’t dressed to kill; he’s a man who is dressed to annihilate.  Everyone, including me, looks.  

“Literally, I was just crossing the street,” he recounts as he settled into our interview cubby, the edges of his beard pointing to the distant ceiling.  “A very beautiful Black woman rolled down the window and said, ‘Bitch, you gotta Work That Look.’  And I said, ‘I will, thank you.’  That’s the kind of world I live in and want to live in and want to support.”  

This is Grant Whittaker, CEO and Senior Director of Grant Whittaker Creative, a self-identified “fashion consulting and production company” which this year celebrates its crystal anniversary as a Mini-Apple institution…but the actual instituting of that institution represents an unlikelihood taller than a warehouse’s ceiling.  

As the teenage son of an American military man and a thoroughly Teutonic woman, Whittaker himself began his working life background dancing in Germany.  After picking up other skills and titles, including those of a makeup artist and fashion stylist, Whittaker put on a full-fledged fashion show at the nigh-Mozartian age of nineteen.  Five years later, after the German military had come a-callin’, Grant Whittaker abandoned a hard-won, carefully cultivated, multi-faceted career in der Vaterland so as to find fighting-free fortune in his father’s land.  

“I was traveling for [renowned fashion house] Christian Dior as a regional makeup artist,” Whittaker says.  “I was with an agency called Suzanne’s which was one of the big modeling and styling agencies in Chicago.  They were repping me as a stylist.  One day, I got a call asking if I would consider auditioning [as a dancer] for what was then Dayton’s Fash Bash.  That brought me to Minneapolis to rehearse.”

The City of Lakes proved a seductively sentimental dance partner.  “When I came to Minneapolis, I took a walk,” Whittaker reminisces.  “There was a beautiful stone arch bridge in Heidelberg where I grew up, and here there was the Stone Arch Bridge, our Stone Arch Bridge.  There were other things in Minneapolis that reminded me of home, too, so I was really drawn.”  

But the bridge to Twin Cities-based success would prove a long and rickety one.  After the conclusion of the Dayton’s Fash Bash gig was followed by months and months and months of personal struggle and professional improvisation, Whittaker was contacted by Dayton’s about putting on a fashion show rather than merely dancing through one.  Augmented by this success, he was tapped to present fashion tips to large audiences via radio, television, print, and the Internet.  Says Whittaker, “They started to call me a style expert, and I thought, ‘Okay, I’m a style expert.’”

This expertise, along with his crazy quilt of creative work experience, was at long last stitched into a formal enterprise.  “Grant Whittaker Style lead me to doing great branded events, great shows using fashion and shows to use color as a vehicle to support philanthropy,” Whittaker remembers.  “This led me to being more real and authentic and true to who I was.”  This status quo occupied the space of Whittaker’s existence for roughly one-and-a-half decades. 

And then…“COVID hit, and things changed,” says Whittaker.  “I traded in my style background and went on to be a creative agency.  I took my experience and turned it into ideation.  That’s what I’ve done my entire life.”  Like that of a certain converted North Loop warehouse, Grant Whittaker’s most recent repurposing is his most people centric.  

“Grant Whittaker Creative is a celebration of people and pride and wanting to be good at one does,” the CEO declares.  “I work with and teach kids and models.  I was the kid who wanted to go into fashion and be part of the scene.  Now, these days, I see kids like me…but I also see the same ‘Where do I fit in?’ quality.  It’s a nice thing to know that you don’t have to fit in—you can just rise above it all.”

After two decades of Twin Towns trending, whether under the banner of Style or Creative, Grant Whittaker is just Grant Whittaker doing what Grant Whittaker has always done—Working That Look and fostering the kind of world he wants to live in.  “When you’re trying to be authentic, trying to be yourself, I’ve seen a lot of people go down the tubes,” Whittaker notes.  “I think some of us go that way because we can’t figure out how to be authentic, how to celebrate the yellow of me or the purple of me.  I’m always trying to fill the rainbow.”

www.grantwhittakercreative.com