Fashion

Duran Lantink Nails His First Couture Collection for Jean Paul Gaultier

BYKhaoula Ghanem

July 14, 2026

Few appointments in recent memory have generated as much skepticism as Duran Lantink’s arrival at Jean Paul Gaultier. His provocative and avante garde ready-to-wear work has always thrived on disruption rather than refinement, and his debut collection for the house earlier this year divided audiences almost immediately. For some, it felt too irreverent for one of couture’s most storied maisons. Yet with each passing season, the Dutch designer is making a stronger case for why he belongs exactly where he is.

Presented once again inside Jean Paul Gaultier’s intimate couture salon in front of an audience that included Cardi B and Nigerian goalkeeper Maduka Okoye, Lantik’s debut couture collection read like an elaborate collision between Louis XIV’s Versailles, Marie Antoinette’s extravagant court, and an imagined future. Here, history provided the silhouettes, while technology reshaped their anatomy.

Monumental panniers returned as exaggerated sculptural volumes, court jackets ballooned into impossible proportions, and corsets no longer simply cinched the waist but entirely reconstructed the body. Rather than reproducing eighteenth-century clothing, Lantink treated it as raw material to manipulate through twenty-first century techniques, creating silhouettes that looked simultaneously familiar and strangely alien.

Several of the strongest looks demonstrated exactly how comfortable the 2025 International Woolmark Prize winner already feels speaking Gaultier’s visual language. A rigid burgundy velvet gown inflated into two perfectly rounded sculptural volumes before revealing an oversized glass medallion across the chest, preserving delicate sprigs of white lavender beneath its surface. The piece nodded directly to Le Mâle, the house’s iconic fragrance, transforming one of Gaultier’s most recognizable signatures.

Another striking look replaced traditional tailoring altogether with a deep crimson body carapace, its glossy surface recalling molded armor more than clothing. Lantink even 3D-scanned the torso of longtime Gaultier muse Leon Dame before reconstructing it into an internally corseted shell that distorted the body’s proportions, effectively giving him an entirely new anatomy.

Perhaps what impressed most, however, was Lantink’s understanding that the Jean Paul Gaultier archive should never become a museum. Throughout the collection, familiar house signatures resurfaced without feeling like straightforward reproductions. Corsets, cone bras, tailored jackets, striped fabrics, biker leathers, and theatrical body exaggerations all returned, but each had been reimagined through fresh construction methods rather than nostalgia. Even Gaultier’s famous cone bra abandoned its traditional placement, migrating across garments as abstract protrusions that reshaped entirely different parts of the body.

There is still an unmistakable irreverence running through Lantik’s work, but it now feels disciplined rather than reactionary. If his first season asked whether he deserved this appointment, his second quietly suggested that Jean Paul Gaultier may have chosen exactly the right designer to lead the house into its next chapter.