March 9, 2026 |
Smoking hot. That’s the best way to describe Duran Lantink’s audacious sophomore show for Jean Paul Gaultier, which put the focus on tailoring and served some of the most exciting silhouettes of Paris Fashion Week.
Lantink is known for his shape-altering clothes which use padding, wires and pattern cutting wizardry to manipulate the line of a look. Cross that with Gautlier’s heritage for couture-level cuts that defy convention and you have a recipe for something startling.
“What is so important at Jean Paul Gaultier is that you have the freedom to experiment and have this fun energy that’s what I wanted,” he said backstage. Lantink did not disappoint.
Reflecting on his creative arc at the house, the designer said his debut show was personal – drawing on his first memories of the Gaultier brand (as a child he recalled how formative it was for him to see his parents dressing in it to go out: “I started realising there’s a world where people dress differently and they’re quite extreme and fin”). His second show was based on detailed research of Gaultier’s tailoring. “It’s a lot about my personal relationship with Mr Gaultier. I started thinking about his tailoring and for me tailoring was a new way of thinking. I started digging into his tailoring, researching it and I really wanted to create this madame masculinity,“ he said.
The first looks blended masculine and feminine, with a man’s coat softened with his signature sloping shoulders and gathered into skirts at the waist. Lantink plays freely with proportions and ideas.
The neck of a pinstripe shirt, the tie still attached, was worn over the head like a hoodie. The matching pinstripe trousers that came with the look had pinstripe knickers and suspenders attached to the outside of the garment, not underneath, a play on Gaultier’s ownership of underwear as outerwear.
Lantink has his own signatures. The shoulders of jackets rose up to the ears, creating an extreme hourglass look, the front of a check tailored shirt jutted out in a single erect pleat. A quilted ski jacket body suit was worn over wide pinstripe trousers. One velvet bomber jacket had a huge demogorgon-style collar. The ideas came thick and fast in a collection that was almost breathless with invention.
The fun kept coming. Lantink revisited his naked trompe l’oeil idea of last season, this time using images of articulated artists’s mannequins instead of fleshy bodies.
Alex Consani walked the catwalk as smoke billowed from her hair, wearing a column dress printed with a Dietrich puffing on a cigarette. “I really like the performative parts of Mr. Gaultier’s work and I wanted to make smoking dresses and it was almost as if you were in a western movie and you come into a saloon and all of a sudden there is smoke and a cowboy comes behind you I thought would nice if they were cinematic characters and dig into that.” Black clad women in sculptural tailoring and cowboy hats brought to mind Yul Brynner’s killer cowboy robot in Westworld.
The evening looks with draped panniered gowns and bulbous bustles promise plenty of red carpet drama. Behind it all is Lantink: fearless, playful, inventive and skilled. Backstage Mr Gaultier congratulated him saying, “Fabulous! Fabulous! Fabulous!” Enough said.
Photography courtesy of Jean Paul Gaultier.
