An heir to fashion’s perpetual “enfant terrible” Jean Paul Gaultier (who retired in 2020) has finally been named. It is Duran Lantink, a 37-year-old Dutchman with a cheeky sense of humor and an eye for exaggerated silhouettes. “I’m really about shape and forms, and trying to create new ideas,” the designer recently told Luke Leitch.
Lantink is also a repurposer, one who is alert to the potential in existing garments and materials. This kind of thinking similarly animated many of Gaultier’s early collections. Gaultier magicked straw placemats into dresses, and proposed tea strainers and copper pot scrubbers as jewelry. It was while feeding his cat that he got the idea of converting metal cans into bracelets; subsequently they became part of the house iconography and fragrance packaging.
Related to the elevation of everyday items into extraordinary objets is an appreciation for a lived-in look. When Gaultier launched couture for spring 1997, the collection included looks made from his own upcycled jeans. In an interview with Fantastic Man, Lantink declared his love of “worn-in clothes.”
Still, the most visual link between Lantink and Gaultier is their shared preference for blown-up looks. Where the Dutch designer molds pliable foam forms, the Frenchman preferred hot air. He closed his famous Cyberpunk collection of fall 1995 with puffed hats that were inflated by the hand-held bonnet hair dryers—of the sort his grandmother used to use. The designs, he said, were “flat, and when you put the air—poof—it becomes like an erection.” Lantink has a lot to build on at Gaultier.
