Duran Lantink

Duran Lantink is the designer Puig chose to end an experiment. Since Jean Paul Gaultier stepped back from his own runway in 2020, the house he founded had been run as a rotation of guest couturiers, each given a single season to reinterpret its archive before handing over to the next name. On 15 April 2025, Puig named Lantink the first permanent successor to Gaultier himself: not another guest, but a creative director with no announced end date. (Euronews; The Impression)

He arrived with a decade of his own reputation already built. Under his own name, Lantink had made a method out of not starting from a bolt of cloth: existing garments, deadstock, and other labels' unsold stock became his raw material, recut and reassembled into sculptural, gender-fluid new pieces. That practice had already won him ANDAM's Special Prize, LVMH's Karl Lagerfeld Special Jury Prize, and the International Woolmark Prize inside three years, and had put his work on Janelle Monáe, Beyoncé and Billie Eilish before it ever reached Gaultier's ateliers.

A childhood spent taking clothes apart

Lantink was born in The Hague in December 1987, an only child who has described growing up partly inside his own imagination, playing with tarot cards and I-Ching stones. At eleven he dyed his hair shocking pink hoping to be picked for a Walter Van Beirendonck show; he still owns a Van Beirendonck T-shirt given to him by an aunt. At fifteen he staged his first fashion show on a beach in Scheveningen, using discarded Diesel jeans and tablecloths taken from his grandmother. (Fantastic Man)

He trained first at a secondary school for teenage art talents and then at AMFI, Amsterdam's fashion academy, before a struggle with formal pattern-making pushed him toward the method that would define his career: a tutor, watching him unable to draft a pattern from scratch, told him plainly that what he was already wearing — cut and restitched by hand — was what people actually wanted. He completed a bachelor's degree in fashion at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2013 and a master's at the adjoining Sandberg Instituut in 2017. (Fantastic Man)

Recutting rather than sewing

After graduating, Lantink approached London boutiques, including Browns, to rework their unsold designer inventory into new pieces rather than start from raw fabric — an early version of the upcycling process that has stayed central to his work ever since. "I don't need to make new things in order to make new fashion," he has said, framing the approach less as an environmental statement than as a creative constraint he finds generative. (W Magazine)

Accounts differ on exactly when this became a label rather than a practice: Dazed dates the Duran Lantink brand to 2016, while W Magazine describes his first proper collection, made with the mentorship of stylist Patti Wilson, as arriving in 2020. What is not in dispute is that the label joined the official Paris Fashion Week calendar in March 2023, giving his upcycled, often one-off garments a scheduled, dated place in the fashion system for the first time. (Dazed; W Magazine)

Sistaaz of the Castle, and dressing pop culture

In 2016 Lantink collaborated with the photographer Jan Hoek on Sistaaz of the Castle, a project documenting transgender sex workers in Cape Town through a photographic series and a fashion collection built around the women's own resourceful, self-styled dressing. The work, shown at Amsterdam's Foam museum and during Amsterdam Fashion Week, won the Fashion category at the Dutch Design Awards; the jury noted its argument that "everyone is a designer." Lantink went on to sustain a six-year working relationship with the Cape Town sex-worker rights organisation SWEAT. (Dutch Design Awards; W Magazine)

His clothes found a parallel audience through music and celebrity styling. In 2018 he designed the widely discussed "vagina" trousers worn by Janelle Monáe in the video for "Pynk," and his work has since dressed Beyoncé, Billie Eilish and Doja Cat — visibility that arrived well before any luxury house had hired him. (RUSSH)

Three prizes, and a controversy, before Paris called

The recognition compounded quickly. ANDAM awarded Lantink its Special Prize in 2023, citing his circular process of combining pre-loved garments and deadstock fabric with new sustainable materials. In September 2024 the LVMH Group gave him its Karl Lagerfeld Special Jury Prize — a €200,000 endowment plus a year of in-house mentorship — with Delphine Arnault citing his "body-transforming offbeat garments." In April 2025 a panel chaired by Donatella Versace awarded him the International Woolmark Prize for a collection of reconstructed knitwear built from recycled army sweaters and Dutch textile techniques. (ANDAM; LVMH; WWD)

The same run of seasons was not free of friction. His own-label show that March, titled Duranimal, sent silicone breast prosthetics down the runway and drew a public rebuke from a fellow designer, who called it "mockery of the female body." The remark followed Lantink into his next job within weeks. (Dazed)

Ending Gaultier's five years of guests

Puig's announcement named Lantink permanent creative director of Jean Paul Gaultier, ending a five-year run of guest designers — among them Chitose Abe, Olivier Rousteing, Haider Ackermann and Ludovic de Saint-Sernin — each of whom had taken a single season to reinterpret the house's archive since the founder's 2020 retirement from the runway. Gaultier himself endorsed the choice: "I see in him the energy, audacity and playful spirit through fashion that I had at the beginning of my own journey: the new enfant terrible of fashion. Welcome, Duran." Lantink answered in kind: "I consider Jean-Paul Gaultier a genius and part of a generation that kicked down the doors, so people like us can walk freely and be who we are without apology." (Euronews)

Junior, and a second heartbeat

Lantink's first collection for the house, shown in October 2025 for Spring/Summer 2026, was titled Junior after the cult Junior Gaultier line of 1988–1994. It moved through the archive obliquely rather than quoting it directly: pneumatic clementine-orange padding, Breton stripes wrapped spirally around the body, a bisected trenchcoat, and a dragon-embroidered corset translated onto nude tulle, alongside sly nods to the house's 1984 "Barbès" and 1995 "Mad Max" collections. Reception was largely enthusiastic — Numéro called him "the worthy heir" to Gaultier — though some critics carried the Duranimal breast-prosthetic controversy into their reading of the new collection's body politics. (AnOther; Numéro; Dazed)

A second ready-to-wear collection followed on 8 March 2026, for Autumn/Winter 2026. Lantink built it around Marlene Dietrich's "feminine-masculinity," subverting 1930s-cut suiting — an elongated navy blazer worn with its collar turned upside down, a wool skirt cut to the crotch and paired with a bomber-vest hybrid — alongside winter-sports colourblocking and Fair Isle-adjacent knitted bodysuits. (W Magazine)

His haute couture debut, delayed from an originally announced January 2026 slot, arrived on 8 July 2026 with a collection titled Tech Couture. Flexible TPU and PA12, both 3D-printed, formed exoskeletons that amplified panniers and corsetry into dramatically oversized, alien-looking volumes, worked alongside feathered gowns by the ateliers of Maison Février and embroidery that copied the pattern of Marie Antoinette's canopy bed at Versailles. The critic Alexander Fury called the collection "wickedly inventive" and "clothes to lose your head over"; other coverage described it more simply as "ambitious, strange and physically charged." As of September 2026, it remains his only haute couture collection for the house. (AnOther; Design Scene)

Reading the labels

Two distinct bodies of work carry Lantink's name, and they should not be confused. Garments labelled Duran Lantink are his own-name output from 2020 (or, on some accounts, 2016) onward: because so many are cut from deadstock or a single donor garment, exact repeats are the exception rather than the rule, and a season name matters more than a size run in placing any individual piece. Garments labelled Jean Paul Gaultier are a different matter entirely. Because the house cycled through Chitose Abe, Olivier Rousteing, Haider Ackermann and Ludovic de Saint-Sernin before Lantink's appointment, a Jean Paul Gaultier label alone does not identify a designer — the season and collection name do that work. Only ready-to-wear from Spring/Summer 2026 ("Junior") onward and haute couture from Fall/Winter 2026 ("Tech Couture") onward should be attributed to Lantink; anything earlier belongs to whichever guest couturier held that particular season, or to the house under Jean Paul Gaultier's own direction before 2020.

References

• Euronews. "Jean Paul Gaultier names Dutch designer Duran Lantink as permanent successor." 15 April 2025.
• The Impression. "Duran Lantink Named Creative Director of Jean Paul Gaultier."
• Fantastic Man. "Duran Lantink."
• W Magazine. "Inside Duran Lantink's Surreal, Sustainable, and Seriously Fun World of Fashion." 2023.
• Dutch Design Awards. "Sistaaz of the Castle." 2016.
• RUSSH. "Who is Duran Lantink? Meet Jean Paul Gaultier's new creative director."
• ANDAM. "Duran Lantink." 2023 laureate profile.
• LVMH. "2024 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, 11th Edition: the winners." 10 September 2024.
• WWD. "Donatella Versace Awards Duran Lantink With 2025 International Woolmark Prize." April 2025.
• Dazed. "Jean Paul Gaultier SS26: Inside Duran Lantink's disruptive debut." October 2025.
• AnOther. "Tracing Duran Lantink's Archival Pulls at His Jean Paul Gaultier Debut." October 2025.
• Numéro. "Duran Lantink, the worthy heir to Jean Paul Gaultier."
• W Magazine. "Jean Paul Gaultier Fall 2026 Is Duran Lantink's Ode to the Masculin-Féminin." March 2026.
• Alexander Fury for AnOther. "Duran Lantink Loses His Head at Jean Paul Gaultier." July 2026.
• Design Scene. "Duran Lantink Rewires Jean Paul Gaultier Couture FW26." July 2026.