Fashion’s new ‘enfant terrible’: Lantink leads Gaultier

Five years after Jean Paul Gaultier took his final bow and stepped away from designing, the house that defined much of late 20th-century fashion has finally named a creative successor. And it didn’t opt for a safe pair of hands. Dutch designer Duran Lantink was announced today as the brand’s first official creative director since Gaultier’s retirement — a move that feels less like a quiet transition and more like a bold reawakening. Lantink will be responsible for both ready-to-wear and haute couture. His debut, a ready-to-wear collection, is scheduled for this September during Paris Fashion Week. It will mark Jean Paul Gaultier’s return to the RTW runway after more than a decade. His first couture collection is expected to be revealed in January next year. “In Duran, I see the energy, courage, and sense of play I had when I was younger,” Jean Paul Gaultier, said in a statement. “He’s the new generation’s enfant terrible.” Lantink has built a reputation on subversion. His work often dismantles boundaries — between genders, between beauty ideals, and between the body and what fashion expects it to be. Who is Duran Lantink? Fashion’s new provocateur Perhaps his most talked-about piece, a pair of “vagina pants” custom-made for singer Janelle Monáe, was an unapologetic manifesto of bodily autonomy and identity politics. In 2024, he was awarded a special prize by the Karl Lagerfeld Foundation, cementing his position as one of fashion’s most closely watched provocateurs. His 2025 “Duranimal” collection at Paris Fashion Week only deepened the divide between admirers and skeptics. With pieces like muscular silhouettes for women and sculpted prosthetics for men, Lantink stirred heated conversation. Some called the designs gratuitously shocking; others saw them as incisive critiques of gender norms and performative identity. Regardless of the verdict, few were left indifferent — exactly the reaction Gaultier himself once thrived on. When two generations of rebels collide The appointment, in many ways, comprises a meeting of kindred spirits. Gaultier’s legacy is steeped in rebellion: Madonna’s cone bra, the scandalously irreverent “Chic Rabbis” collection, gender-bending tailoring before it was industry parlance. His fashion was never just about clothes; it was about confrontation, expression, and gleeful anarchy. In an age when most luxury houses lean into predictability, Jean Paul Gaultier’s decision to hand the reins to a self-declared fashion anarchist is rebellious. If Lantink can fuse his radical instincts with the house’s iconography — its humor, its sensuality, its irreverent elegance — Jean Paul Gaultier might not just return to relevance, it could once again define the cultural edge.

Fashion’s new ‘enfant terrible’: Lantink leads Gaultier

On this page

Published April 15, 2025

Sectors

Insights

Company

Fashion’s new ‘enfant terrible’: Lantink leads Gaultier