The king abdicated in 2020. Fashion’s enfant terrible staged his own funeral with impeccably dressed mourners and a coffin with breasts, so when he announced that Jean Paul Gaultier would become an open court, no one was particularly surprised. Every season, a different designer was invited to rule, each offering their own interpretation of the kingdom before passing the crown along. Until now. With his Haute Couture debut, Duran Lantink is no longer a guest, but the appointed heir. And, as with every new monarch, the whispers have already begun.
It was one of fashion’s boldest succession plans. The revolving door began with Chitose Abe and her tribute to Les Tatouages. Simone Rocha reimagined Le Marinière through her own gothic lens, while Glenn Martens infused the House’s signatures with his own Y/Project sensibility. Olivier Rousteing turned to one of Gaultier’s greatest muses, Madonna, and the procession concluded with Ludovic de Saint Sernin. Each designer ruled for a season, but no palace can live on regents forever.
Jean Paul Gaultier needed to restore the Maison’s long-term identity by entrusting the crown to someone who could do more than reinterpret his legacy. Appointed creative director in 2025, the Dutch designer was an unexpected choice, though perhaps not an entirely surprising one. Seeing Lantink’s infamous Vagina Pants from his own label, it’s easy to draw a line back to Jean Paul Gaultier’s cone bra.
Both designers share an instinct for provocation, exaggerated silhouettes and an irrepressible desire to defy convention. But while Gaultier’s provocations were rooted in people, Lantink’s seem primarily rooted in form. His debut couture collection feels exactly like the opening chapter of a ‘Lantinkverse’. Somewhere between Versailles and the year 2263, Marie Antoinette meets futuristic eccentricity in the most dystopian version of The Fifth Element.
Yet no matter how far Lantink travels into his own land, the ghosts of the palace can’t stay behind. Gaultier’s fingerprints are everywhere: in three decades of recycled denim, in the biker jackets, in the sculptural corsets and even in the tubular volumes first explored in the costumes he designed for a ballet in 1986. The cones return too, only this time they migrate across the body as a series of thorn-like protrusions.
His choice of muse feels fitting. History rarely welcomes disruption with open arms: the very silhouette that scandalised Versailles eventually became desirable throughout the French aristocracy. Lantink’s debut last season may have divided opinion, and this collection might send him even closer to the guillotine, but then again, fashion has never been especially kind to its revolutionaries.
He imagines the French court centuries later, as though someone had attempted to rebuild it from memory. Marie Antoinette’s panniers have been split open, turned upside down or hollowed out until cascades of tulle burst unexpectedly from the front, the back or, at times, both. Elsewhere, echoes of the robe à l’anglaise emerge, albeit re-engineered through exaggerated padding, corsetry and punctured crinolines. Brocades inspired by Her Majesty’s bedchambers lend the collection an unmistakably courtly air, while the suivez-moi-jeune-homme ribbons recall a time when every flick of a fan carried a secret message. Even the culottes à la française wink mischievously.
Collars either project dramatically forwards or tighten around the neck with an almost suffocating grip. One cannot help wondering whether that sense of constriction also reflects the pressure of a debut, of inheriting the whole kingdom. Like Jean Paul before him, Lantink understands that Haute Couture is theatre. Perhaps his most compelling statement lies in defending couture as gloriously impractical. It “belongs to the realm of fantasy”, and fantasy, after all, has never had any obligation to justify itself.
Whether this is “Absolute Couture” or not shall fall under the scrutiny of le peuple and of JPG himself. However, one thing is undeniable: he has left the courtiers talking. For now, let’s just hope this one gets to keep his head.
