The antics of Duran Lantink are keeping audiences entertained at Jean Paul Gaultier shows. As the founder’s successor (JPG was in the audience), he’s obviously been picked for his sense of humor and his wildly unpredictable turns on clothing and the body. “Well, it’s serious work,” he said backstage. “But there is a type of fun, and I think there should be humor because when we are doing fittings, we’re having so much fun. But we do take it very seriously.”
Creative directors often struggle when they have the history of a massive archive and the fond memories of audiences to contend with. Lantink isn’t really one of those; he’s comfortable playing around with Gaultier codes while also going off on his own tangents. This ready-to-wear collection cut between the two. The surprise was that there was a lot that was wearable, but without the blandness that term can carry.
A couple of white, impeccably tailored coats started things off—no one should forget that JPG’s excellence in suiting was a foundation stone of his business, as it was of his protégé Martin Margiela later on. It’s not difficult to pick out the more ‘normal’ looking elements of the collection on the screen: the red and white checked shirt andskirt, the kilt (a nod to JPG’s putting men in skirts), oversized bomber jackets, a jersey dress a with flouncy hem.
But still, face-on photographs can’t adequately capture the three-dimensionality of Lantink’s pieces, which is why he made his show set a hall of mirrors. His update on Gaultier’s classic bullet bras involved turning the cups into upturned horns and embedding them into garments. He loves things that stick out in front in all kinds of ways: a lace camisole got a tubular frontage, trenches got built-out reinforcements in the collar, and there’s no actual fashion term for the way he makes a pair of stiff handle-like devices swoop up from the bottom of a bathing suit to its top. A draped white halter dress that looks quite regular in pictures is in fact suspended off the body like a baby’s fancy cot.
Or something like that. Often, with Lantink, you find yourself reaching for absurd visual comparisons—like the gushing haute couture pipes he showed in the summer. Experimentalism is all very welcome in a time that tends to quash creativity for the sake of commerciality. “I think it’s really important for me to start repeating and exploring things that I’ve already done to make sure that we kind of get a recognizable code, a new code in the house,” he said.
At the show’s end, models were jingling along wearing pieces festooned with bells. He said he’d been inspired by opening a drawer at the Gaultier office and finding a glove decorated with bells from 1989. “I liked that because the person who loves Gaultier is also a bit loud,” he quipped. True: Gaultier’s original 1980s devotees were totally up for the gender-bending and posing possibilities of his work. For sure, there are plenty in their children’s and grandchildren’s generations who get fun and provocation out of being looked at. Looks like in Lantink, Gaultier’s found its own second-generation enfant terrible just for them.
