It was standing room only at Duran Lantink’s show. The Dutch designer picked up LVMH’s Karl Lagerfeld Prize earlier this month, so his early adopters were joined by people curious to discover what the LVMH jury saw in him. If I had to guess, I would say it’s his flair for the surreal and a commitment to his unique vision. The Lagerfeld Prize recognizes the “creativity of young brands.”
There’s an absurdist streak running through the spring collections, a rejection of the straight and narrow and the safety that designers, who’ve been buffeted by strong economic headwinds, have been pursuing lately. This season, they have turned to risk-taking, ingenuity, and fun. Lantink has represented all of that since the COVID days, when he used drone footage to make one of the pandemic era’s most creative fashion films to showcase his repurposed unsold designer clothes.
In the seasons since, he’s pivoted his focus to extremes of silhouette, shaping an avant-garde aesthetic that, despite its exaggeration of form—or maybe because of it—is now resonating IRL on the street. Model Rianne Van Rompaey, who is also Dutch, was at the show today in a cropped black leather bomber with linebacker padding on the shoulders and upper torso, which is one of Lantink’s signatures.
This season, the designer went to the beach, inserting inner tubes of padding in one-piece swimsuits and adding several cup sizes and generous uplift to bikini tops. Full-body bodysuits, meanwhile, were padded at the joints, making the models resemble insects or aliens—weird stuff. Other looks were accessorized with handbags worn as bonnets, the straps tucked under the chin. It was almost as if Lantink was compensating for the more commercial instincts of the T-shirt fabric he used for a slouchy trench and corset-waist dresses. “It was really important to think a bit more about wearability, but still in a very fun way,” he said.
The exceptional silver jewelry belonged to Carla Sozzani and was made by her companion, Kris Ruhs. The sculptural necklaces claimed space in a similar way to Lantink’s bold designs.
