Jean Paul Gaultier Couture Gets the Duran Lantink Treatment

Jean Paul Gaultier has long held the title of fashion’s foremost enfant terrible. It’s a mantle Duran Lantink has picked up with pride since joining the brand last year, and one that he capitalized on tenfold for his debut couture show today.

Held inside a stark white venue in Paris, the offering centered on the dialogue between heritage couture techniques and the advent of new technologies—and yes, that includes artificial intelligence.

The show opened with a sharply tailored coatdress, a polished fake-out before the collection veered into pure mischief. The second outfit, an LBD, was comically reimagined, with a brush-like element bursting at the bust and a bustle poking from an insert that sat away from the model’s rear.

The latter technique appeared throughout the collection, perhaps most strikingly on a black dress that, from the front, read as a conventional evening gown. In profile, however, the silhouette contorted into a sculptural, tubular form that exposed the legs, transforming the look into a minidress flanked by twin tulle trains. It was a clever riff on Gaultier’s long-standing fascination with trompe l’oeil.

“I want to challenge the garment itself,” Lantink explained in a statement. “To push it to the very limits of its sculptural potential.”

Lantink is a provocateur, sure, as evidenced by the draped circle skirt suspended by lingerie garter straps and a velveteen gown with “horns” protruding from the hips. Or even his choice to show a jean jacket, albeit reworked in couture proportions, with snug capri pants. But like Gaultier, Lantink also has an unmistakable devotion to craft beneath the provocation.

A flamingo-pink evening dress was meticulously covered in feathers with winding tubular elements that melted into the bodice. A tea-length halter dress came embellished with sparkling black paillettes, its hem upturned for an architectural flourish.

Lantink’s innate instinct for the absurd is clear. (A glitched torso corset, morphing as if it had been distorted by AI, seen on model Leon Dame at today’s show echoed the viral, body-morphing “nudes” of his eponymous label.) But there’s also a deep reverence for the world of Gaultier, from the house’s celebration of corsetry—today, absurdist in all shapes and sizes—to its savoir-faire.

Gaultier himself, seated in the front row alongside Teyana Taylor, Cardi B, and Catherine Deneuve, appeared quietly delighted by what his successor—the house’s first permanent creative director aside from its founder—had achieved. After the finale, the pair embraced to a warm ovation: two enfants terribles united by a singular legacy.