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Vincenzo La Torre

Chief Editor, Style; Fashion Editor, Post Magazine


Designer Duran Lantink knows how to create a viral moment. With only a handful of shows under his belt – six for his eponymous brand, now on hiatus, and one for his recent debut as creative director of Jean Paul Gaultier – the 38-year-old is one of the buzziest names in fashion today.

From the vagina trousers worn by Janelle Monáe in her music video for “Pynk” – later exhibited at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum – to influencer Bryanboy’s six-pack prosthetic at a Business of Fashion event during Paris Fashion Week, Lantink has been responsible for quite a few headline-making looks.
While it’s easy to dismiss his work as more stunt than substance, there is more to it than meets the eye, as a recent interview revealed.
Affable and unguarded, Lantink is a firm believer in the power of no-holds-barred creativity, as he said repeatedly in a frank conversation in Doha, where he was travelling in November as a jury member of Fashion Trust Arabia, a competition for independent designers from the Middle East and North Africa.
Born in The Hague, Lantink fell in love with fashion at a very young age – long before he moved to Amsterdam at 19 to pursue his art studies.

“In The Hague there was a store, the first store selling Chanel, and I would walk by and look at the windows and ask for lookbooks because the windows looked so pretty, so I was very interested in that,” he recalls fondly. “The ladies were very snobby, but they loved me and let me look at the clothes and the lookbooks. I was in elementary school.”
While he doesn’t necessarily attribute his experimental approach to his unconventional path – he never trained to be a fashion designer – Lantink agrees that taking a slightly different route ended up being an asset rather than a drawback.
“It was good to go to art school rather than fashion school because it gave me a different perspective on what I could do, and it opened up my mind about the meaning of clothing and of media and how I could play with that,” he says. “For some people fashion school really works; for others it’s art school. It’s really based on the person.”

That “different perspective” translated into upcycling materials and creating new shapes and silhouettes with “humps and bumps” and elongated volumes. The designer’s vision fully came to the fore in his autumn/winter 2025 Paris show, his last to date for his own label. A breath of fresh air, the tongue-in-cheek outing made headlines for the six-pack and boob prosthetics worn by models of the opposite sex as well as its clever mixes of prints such as tartan, camouflage, cow, zebra, python and leopard – often in the same outfit. While it may all sound a bit over the top, it actually worked, and added up to a true fashion moment.
“I’m very much a person who follows my intuition, which can sometimes be dangerous because it can work or not work, but what I experienced doing collections is that you work on something with a team – because it’s always a team effort – and then during the fittings you find something interesting and start building on that. Every show is a development of the previous show, and that in a natural way starts becoming a signature,” Lantink says, adding that he and his team often like to be “naughty” when developing a new collection.

In other words, Lantink likes to have fun with his work – a rarity in fashion these days. His willingness not to take himself too seriously made him the perfect heir to the legacy of provocation and irreverence long associated with Jean Paul Gaultier.
Mainly known for his haute couture line and his bestselling fragrances, Jean Paul Gaultier stopped making ready-to-wear in 2014, which gave Lantink the opportunity to revive a previously dormant category and begin a new chapter at the house.

His first show, spring/summer 2026, riffed on Junior, an accessible line that had its heyday in the 90s and was a favourite of young clubbers.
“I liked Junior a lot because it was a collection that culture tapped into – something that young people could buy as it wasn’t as expensive as ready-to-wear,” he says. “It was fun and very naughty and young, and if you look at pictures from the late 80s and 90s, it was very much about club culture and art students.”
His arrival at Jean Paul Gaultier also happened to coincide with a time when the brand was experiencing a sort of renaissance among young people, who have rediscovered it through resale platforms and archival images.

While Lantink welcomes this new-found interest in the label, he also cautions that the industry’s obsession with vintage and constantly looking back is not necessarily a good thing.
“I’ve always been very obsessed with vintage,” he says. “I understand the sustainable [appeal] – I’m very much into that – and that it’s easier for the younger generation to buy vintage because ready-to-wear is too expensive. [Nevertheless,] I feel at this point that we should … stop doing all these re-editions and instead focus on new ideas.”

His debut for the brand involved plenty of new ideas, but some of them didn’t sit well with online commenters and certain fashion critics. Riffing on Gaultier’s signature body prints, Lantink showcased trompe l’oeil patterns of flabby, hairy chests, and even a penis – triggering a backlash on social media. Add to that models in skimpy bikinis and barely there pin-up get-ups, and you have the perfect recipe for a public outcry.
“People were really angry, and I agree that it’s good [to have such a strong reaction], but at the end of the day, I’m a human with emotions,” he says. “[My team worked extremely hard], and we were so happy with [the result], and then all of a sudden the mood changed after the show.
“In the beginning I was a bit overwhelmed because I’ve never had this big of a platform and was a bit naive, but I started reading and analysing the situation, and I felt it was good that [the collection] created this conversation. Even before my first show I knew people would get angry because Jean Paul Gaultier as a person has a lot of fans and is a celebrity and an icon.”

Sharing that he talks regularly with Gaultier, who attended the show and looked very pleased with the effort, Lantink sees the brand as “energetic and fun” and about “what’s happening today, now – and not looking back”.
He is also pragmatic about his decision to put his own brand on hold while taking on this new challenge. “For me to go into a new ecosystem I felt I needed some time to fully understand, and I didn’t want to do two brands at the same time,” he explains. “You need time to focus, but I have a certain kind of handwriting so that won’t disappear.”
Lantink, who moved to Paris for the Gaultier job, is now part of a large corporation – Puig, the parent company of Jean Paul Gaultier, also owns fashion labels including Rabanne, Dries Van Noten and Carolina Herrera, and beauty brands like Byredo and Charlotte Tilbury – but his belief that creativity should reign supreme remains unshaken.

“For me, it’s very important that you follow your ambition and intuition in terms of creativity,” he says. “I know that the business is very important and I understand that, but for a designer starting out it’s also important to develop your creativity and not to focus too much on the commercial part, especially in the beginning.
“At a certain point you need to create your world and need to start understanding how you can connect from a business standpoint and get people to actually buy your product, but sometimes I feel that designers are too focused on the commercial side very early on.”
Wise words that resonate even more at a time when many fashion houses are trying to reinvent themselves to stay relevant in an industry that too often neglects creativity, at the expense of commercial success.


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