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When Jean Paul Gaultier, the French designer and original enfant terrible of the Eighties fashion scene, stepped down from the top position of his couture house in 2020, he was reluctant to hand over the reins immediately.
Instead, the house of JPG was guest-designed by a host of rotating designers, from Glenn Martens and Olivier Rousteing to Haider Ackermann, Simone Rocha and, most recently, Ludovic de Saint Sernin. This system resulted in a host of viral collections presented during Paris’ couture weeks, but now ends as the Puig-owned label announces the appointment of a permanent creative director, Duran Lantink.
The Hague-born, Amsterdam-raised designer who studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut can accurately be described as both a disruptor and provocateur. He will have remained unknown to most until his most recent collection in March, for Autumn/Winter 2025, where the finale look saw a male model laughing while walking in bouncing, silicone breasts.
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A pair of big boobs being the butt of the joke was quickly earned accusations of misogyny, prompting outrage from within the fashion industry, as well as outside. Another high flying new designer, Dilara Findikoglu (who was also tipped to take over JPG) wrote on Instagram: “Disappointed to see mockery of the female body by a young male designer that I actually loved and respected. Honestly it’s so tiring to see men still using our bodies in this medieval mindset.”
Lantink, also creator of the “vagina” trousers worn by Janelle Monáe in her Pynk music video back in 2018, will have known the decision would be controversial. It certainly feels plucked from Gaultier’s playbook, who too sought shock-value with his 1983-designed conical bra, made global by Madonna on the Nineties Blonde Ambition tour.
“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,” Gaultier said in a statement.
“I consider Jean Paul Gaultier as 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,” Lantink said. “Stepping into the role of creative director is a true honour. To me, 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.”
His approach has been welcomed by the fashion industry. Earlier this month his tongue-in-cheek and often body-morphing designs won him the 2025 International Woolmark Prize, presented to him by Donatella Versace in Milan. He also won the Andam Special Prize in 2023 and the LVMH Prize’s Karl Lagerfeld Award for young designers in 2024.
I will never forget the first time I met Lantink, in 2020, during a British Fashion Council pop up fair championing “Positive Fashion”. Some designers had crafted skirts from various exotic plant leaves; others had reworked charity shop frocks into trendy tops.
“I decided to do a kleptomaniac collection”, Lantink told me, gesturing towards his rail of monochrome, collaged satin slips and asymmetric lace blouses, in front of a spray painted sign which read, alarmingly, “STOLEN BY DURAN.”
All the materials used had been shoplifted fast fast fashion’s shop floors (“H&M, Zara, Mango, Bershka”), he quietly explained. “Why not start stealing back from fast fashion because they have been stealing for so long?”
Lantink will present his first ready-to-wear collection for Jean Paul Gaultier in September 2025, followed by his debut couture collection in January 2026.
