Fashion’s Rule-Breaker: Why Duran Lantink Is the Ultimate Disruptor
Image credit: Duran Lantink
Duran Lantink just dropped his new campaign starring none other than Alex Consani, and she's wearing these glamorous shorts with a red, glamorous period pad.
Now, Duran Lantink is no stranger to utilizing gender symbolism—more specifically, his work often transforms traditional ideas of femininity into something unexpected, using visual storytelling rather than explicit representation. We all remember the vagina pants he created for Janelle Monáe, right? Or the supersized bras from his SS25 collection that looked like prosthetic boobs?
Janelle Monae wearing Lantink’s vagina pants
Duran Lantink has exponentially grown in just two years—Lucien Pages is now handling his press, and he's getting so much more recognition.
There’s a rumor going around that he might be the next guest designer in line for Jean Paul Gaultier couture, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that announcement came out soon.
Having Lantink represent Jean Paul Gaultier would actually make perfect sense—not just for couture, but for the brand’s future direction in general. You all know that Duran Lantink has carved his path in fashion by prioritizing his first love: going against the traditional system through upcycling. He started his own brand in college by making collages, refusing to use new fabrics to create garments from scratch. Instead, he sourced deadstock from multibrand boutiques and transformed it into new clothes. Now, a lot of people might think he simply DIYs clothes, but what he actually does is deconstruct garments, reshape their fabrics into innovative designs, and create something entirely new. And of course, today, that hasn’t gone unnoticed. Treating finished garments as an evolving process rather than static products? That sounds like something Jean Paul Gaultier would absolutely love.
What’s most exciting is Lantink’s anti-fashion approach to garment-making. He’s created pieces by mixing textiles from competitor brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton, constantly challenging not just gender norms, but consumerism itself. Fashion today is paying the price of overproduction, and many luxury brands are suffering right now—but this only means that designers like Lantink could make a real difference by taking a different approach with unused garments. This rebellious attitude reminds me a lot of a young Jean Paul Gaultier.
If you think about it, Duran Lantink feels like a modern, sustainability-driven evolution of Gaultier’s legacy—someone who remixes, deconstructs, and plays with gender and culture to disrupt traditional fashion narratives. If Gaultier was the enfant terrible of the ’80s and ’90s, Lantink could totally be his spiritual successor. I think the message Lantink wants to send to the fashion world should be amplified.