September 3, 2025 |
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most radical designer of them all? Every era has a fashion maverick – a norm-busting creative who reshapes the silhouette. In 2025, Duran Lantink, 38, with his clever, clothes-morphing proportions, collaged designs and new role as the creative director of Jean Paul Gaultier, can claim the title. Old rules don’t interest him.
“Now more than ever, it’s important to be a bit more radical because if we’re not being radical, what are we doing?” he said after he won the 2025 International Woolmark Prize (the Dutch designer also scooped the 2023 ANDAM Special Prize and the 2024 Karl Lagerfeld Prize, part of the LVMH Prize). It’s rare for a designer to state so boldly their desire to create something truly new, but Lantink is fearless.
There’s a twinkle in his eye that translates even over Zoom. “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,” said Gaultier in a statement, recognising a kindred spirit. Lantink’s wit (remember the audacious vagina pants he designed for Janelle Monáe’s Pynk video?) lends an irresistible lightness to the restless and existential questioning embedded in every piece. Silhouettes, fabrication, craft, sexuality and presentation? Everything is up for re-evaluation in Lantink’s mind.
“It’s important to start figuring out new things and not care about the rules too much,” he said backstage after his AW25 collection. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it forever, but at this point, I’d like to rethink how clothes can sit on the body and how they communicate.” Shown on a damp Paris morning, in an empty office space, the collection sent seasoned editors away with their minds blown.
DURAN LANTINK
Enter the female model Mica Argañaraz, wearing a male chest prosthetic (complete with six pack) and black trousers, tailored with an interesting fold detail at the waist and just the right amount of slouch through the leg. Message received: Lantink is a designer who can cut as well as play with padding and proportions. He also wants to challenge the gender dichotomy. There’s nothing new in women wearing men’s clothes on the catwalk, but wearing men’s bodies? That’s more radical.
The idea came to him as an answer to critics. “People were saying I was body-morphing by using padding, but the padding was actually to morph the clothes, not necessarily the body. I know that when you wear a clothing piece it morphs the body as well, but it was never really a starting point. It was interesting to start thinking about morphing the body and felt like a Marcel Duchamp approach. I also feel like it became like a superhero thing,” he says of the jacked silicone torso he bought for the occasion.
Lantink decided he needed to end his show with the reverse of the opening look, using a male model, Chandler Frye, in those same fold-fronted slouch trousers, wearing a pair of voluptuous prosthetic breasts that jiggled provocatively with every step. Lantink had tried it with smaller boobs, but the DD size better suited Frye’s broad shoulders.
DURAN LANTINK
For some, it wittily underlined the point of the opening look, which aimed to show that gender can be pulled on and bodies can be modified to suit the individual. Others found the gesture an insult to women and vented in comment sections all over the internet. “I would never want to mock women. In no way would I want to do that. It was a conversation [about] morphing the body and making it blurry. I think it’s also a very important time to again show that we are free to change or do whatever we want to do to ourselves,” says Lantink.
The threads of bigger conversations – sexuality, gender, freedom, sustainability, taste – are woven though his work, although he admits they might not always be explicit when he starts. “It’s an intuitive way of working, which I like. And then in the end it becomes a language and a story that has a bigger meaning,” he says of his creative process. “I find it hard to explain the bigger meaning because I just hope that it’s being shown during the show and I hope that my collection is worth more than my words.”
The radical space is where Lantink feels most at home. Naughty by nature, he’s always pushed boundaries. “When I was in elementary school, I was always the naughty boy that did things the way that you were not supposed to,” he says. His instinct is to break the rules. “What are we supposed to do? Follow them? How did that bring anything new? How does that accomplish something new and interesting?” he says.
DURAN LANTINK
His AW25 show did that in abundance, presenting new ideas and proportions with every look. A voluptuous, snakeskin-print, lampshade-skirted minidress, its shoulder line and collar swelling up as high as the model’s ears, created an arresting ‘no-neck’ silhouette.
As for the cow skin, zebra stripe, leopard and tiger patterns on belted jackets and funnel-neck catsuits with padded hips, Lantink says he wasn’t expecting to do a collection of animal prints (which he mixed with tartans and camouflage). But when he saw a bolt of brazen snake-print fabric in a shop, something clicked. “I thought, ‘Oh, it’s actually quite amazing’,” he says of what became his dizzying, delirious Duranimal collection.
The surprises kept coming, from a classic button-down shirt migrating down the body and cleverly transforming into a very chic skirt, to a dress, hand-knitted in Amsterdam, orbited by matching padded infinity bands. “We wanted to combine hand-knitting, a very old craft, with forms and make it feel futuristic,” he says. His clothes-morphing ideas were taken to the extreme with an Aran knit, pulled over the head and worn with a padded trapper hat, tartan trousers and a matching kilt which ‘floated’ from a bar suspended at the waist so that it stood away from the body. “I like the magic and unexpectedness of it,” he says of these radical floating pieces, which evolved as a reaction to the padded pieces he’d become known for. “We are doing many forms and three-dimensional things, and I like the idea of injecting something that looks two-dimensional from the front, but then when you turn around it becomes a three-dimensional thing.”
DURAN LANTINK
Boys and girls wore versions of that look in the show. Two came out wearing jeans suspended in front of their bodies but were naked from behind – the bare arse cheek of it! “I don’t know if my work is sexual. I guess it’s a bit provocative. It just feels right to cut out the ass part,” he muses. But those bigger conversations are never far away. “I think it’s also about the environment that we live in. It’s a very sexual environment, but it’s sexual in a very different way – very plastic surgery. It’s about perfection and symmetry. I find a provocative, raw-dogging sexuality more interesting for me to explore, rather than this perfection aesthetic.”
Lantink credits the freedom and creativity he was exposed to as a child as formative. “Children copy what they see. I was lucky enough to be surrounded by creative people.” He was precociously into fashion and recalls watching Absolutely Fabulous with his mother, who works in interior design. By the age of eight, he had already decided on a career in fashion. “I did a whole presentation in the fourth grade about Chanel,” he says. By 11, he was wearing Walter Van Beirendonck’s Wild & Lethal Trash label and even wrote to the designer begging to be in his show. “Walter never replied,” he notes wistfully. Meanwhile, Lantink’s personal style became more avant-garde: obsessed with Gaultier, the house he now leads, he started wearing skirts and piercing his ears multiple times with a needle.
DURAN LANTINK
At school in The Hague, “they all thought I was weird. I didn’t have good relationships with any of the teachers. I was also quite a stubborn child, so maybe people would try to mentor me, but then I would do what I wanted to do anyway.”
At 15, Lantink staged his first commercial fashion show, which featured designs made from his dad’s Diesel jeans spliced with vintage tablecloths, then slashed into miniskirts. You can trace his love affair with upcycling right back to that collection, which he sold to a local boutique.
“Maybe it was a starting point for me, understanding that you can be different. There isn’t a point where something is wrong. You can push forward and experiment, and be happy and confident with it.”
Emerging as a designer in 2016, he used upcycled deadstock donated by brands and shops. To this day, he can’t look at a piece of clothing without imagining it collaged into something new. “I love to cut up and mix clothes and create a language out of them,” he says. The pandemic forced a rethink, with brands reluctant to hand over deadstock and the designer looking for a way to scale up. “That was where I thought, ‘Okay, I don’t need brands or stock because I have enough ideas.’”
DURAN LANTINK
He moved to Paris and pivoted to showing seasonal collections, which in turn evolved his approach beyond his beloved upcycling. “We started thinking about changing the actual form of a garment rather than colliding them together.” His experiments with extreme silhouettes began in earnest. His design process now involves collaging on the computer but then getting hands-on, fitting and cutting as he goes. “I love to be surrounded by things, get inspired and then change them in my mind. I see a jacket, but then suddenly I think, ‘Ooh, that could actually be good pants.’”
These days, he has his eye on what sells. “There’s a lot of conversation about is it commercial or is it not? Is it only good for the magazines or can we actually wear it?” He’s entering a new era but don’t expect him to follow convention. “I feel like I want to be that naughty boy again from the sixth grade. I’m definitely not going to sit back and be told what to do. That’s not in my nature.”
10 Magazine’s 25 anniversary issue is out on newsstands September 15. Pre-order your copy here.
DURAN LANTINK: NAUGHTY BY NATURE
Photographer ROB RUSLING
Fashion Editor SOPHIA NEOPHITOU
Text CLAUDIA CROFT
Model BALAT PAL at Metropolitan Models
Hair KAZUE DEKI at Calliste Agency using Hair Rituel by SISLEY PARIS
Make-up JOEY CHOY using TATCHA
Manicurist SOPHIE ADAMS at Calliste Agency
Digital operator MANON CLAVELIER
Photographer’s assistants CAMERON KOSKAS and SORAYA SANINI
Fashion assistants ALISA DATSENKO at Noob Agency and GEORGIA EDWARDS
Casting ADAM HINDLE
Production ZAC APOSTOLOU and SONYA MAZURYK
Post-Production STUDIO RUSLING
Clothing and accessories throughout by DURAN LANTINK
On the cover BALAT wears DURAN LANTINK
