April 15, 2025 |
Jean Paul Gaultier has found its new creative director in the form of Dutch designer Duran Lantink.
Aesthetically daring and full of fascinating ideas, Lantink will be in charge of revitalising the house’s ready-to-wear division, which has been put on pause since 2014. He is the first designer to take the helm of the legendary Paris house following Gaultier’s retirement in 2020.
In a statement, Lantink said, “I consider Jean Paul Gaultier a genius and part of a generation that kicked down doors, so people like us can walk through them freely and be who we are without apology. Stepping into the role of Creative Director is a true honor.”
Known for his experimental silhouettes that push and pull proportions to new extremes, Lantink will show his first collection in Paris in September.
He first made a name for himself over a decade ago in Amsterdam, where he patched together unsold garments from the biggest names in luxury to produce his own abstract clothing.
Showing in Paris since 2023, his technically accomplished collections toy with garments we’re exposed to daily through a radical approach to volume. At the shows in Paris back in March, his AW25 outing made for one of the season’s highlights – featuring lampshade-shaped skirts, funnel neck catsuits with padded hips and full bodies painted in animal prints (not to mention a jiggling breastplate thrown in for good measure). His award cabinet includes an Andam Special Prize (2023) and LVMH’s 2024 Karl Lagerfeld Special Jury Prize.
“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,” says Jean Paul Gaultier.
Since Gaultier hanged up his design sheers for good five years back, fashion’s enfant terrible has handed the keys to his eponymous label to a series of guest designers who’ve produced couture collections honouring the codes of the house. Everyone from Haider Ackermann and Glenn Martens through to Simone Rocha, Chitose Abe and most recently Ludovic de Saint Sernin have each funnelled Gaultier tropes through their own distinct lenses. Lantink will pick up the mantle and design Gaultier’s couture collections going forward, with his first collection in January 2026.
Speaking on what the appointment means to him, Lantink said, “Gaultier represents the ultimate house of creative spirit and savoir-faire. It’s provocative, and continuously pushing boundaries. It’s the brand that brings together different disciplines around fashion to create cultural movements, changing the language of clothes and how we wear them in the streets.”
The new age of Gaultier is upon us, congrats Duran!
Photography courtesy of LVMH Award.
