“I think a similarity between me and Monsieur Gaultier is that it always needs to feel playful,” said Duran Lantink. JPG certainly found a mischievous kindred spirit in the Dutch designer, who clambered into the driving seat of his eponymous brand last year. For Lantink’s debut turn around the catwalk, he took Gaultier’s reputation for gender-bending to a graphic extreme. Who can forget those printed bodysuits? This time, as if he wanted to prove that he’s capable of more than a one-off joke, he approached a serious challenge: opening the door to JPG’s extensive tailoring wardrobe.
Lantink said he’d been set off by looking at an image of “Marlene Dietrich with a whip, and it kind of inspired me. So I started off with this idea of Madame Masculinity.” His collectsion of tropes involving displacements of the canon of the suit and masculine fabrics worked nicely. Lantink’s own signature conic shoulder lines and padded protuberances were harnessed into making a collectsion that also properly respected Gaultier’s strengths in tailoring.
He set off with a black overcoat with a pinched-in gathered waist, which in the studio proved to be attached to a waistcoat beneath. Then came a Gaultier bomber, attached to a skirt made of a man’s tailored jacket, with a glimpse of white shirt-tail dangling in front. A bit later, he was taking on the pinstripe suit, growing a shirt collar into a kind of bonnet, with its tie knotted under the chin.
The magic of the original JPG was how he fused his sense of humor with chic. Lantink does the same thing in his own way. He had a Western theme going on, plus a sportswear one, plus lingerie and corsetry, and a nod to Gaultier’s Marionette collectsion in the shape of this season’s bodysuits. That was a lot, but it was also anchored in interesting technical skills, creating skirts with stiff peaks in front, as if—at a guess—formed by shoulder pads. A trio of silhouettes cut from black and white menswear checks showed the Gaultier atelier is still tooled up with all its couture abilities.
There’s a fine line between making a joke and having the technical skill to carve out looks that might actually work in reality. Lantink has been handed a license to play and experiment by Gaultier. That freedom is incredibly rare in today’s brutally commercial world—you can feel his delight in reveling in it, while not taking it for granted. And that’s great.
