Duran Lantink brings his bold own-brand thinking to Jean Paul Gaultier

Jan 11 , 2026

Designer Duran Lantink, the new creative director of Jean Paul Gaultier, is one of the boldest and buzziest names in fashion. Photo: Handout

The brand’s creative director plays with perceptions, gender and styles – sparking debate and building his fan base, including A-listers like Emrata and Janelle Monáe

Designer Duran Lantink knows how to create a viral moment. With only a handful of shows under his belt – six for his eponymous brand, now on hiatus, and one for his recent debut as creative director of Jean Paul Gaultier – the 38-year-old is one of the buzziest names in fashion today.

Jean Paul Gaultier spring/summer 2026. Photo: Handout

From the vagina trousers worn by Janelle Monáe in her music video for “Pynk” – later exhibited at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum – to influencer Bryanboy’s six-pack prosthetic at a Business of Fashion event during Paris Fashion Week, Lantink has been responsible for quite a few headline-making looks.

While it’s easy to dismiss his work as more stunt than substance, there is more to it than meets the eye, as a recent interview revealed.

Affable and unguarded, Lantink is a firm believer in the power of no-holds-barred creativity, as he said repeatedly in a frank conversation in Doha, where he was travelling in November as a jury member of Fashion Trust Arabia, a competition for independent designers from the Middle East and North Africa.

Born in The Hague, Lantink fell in love with fashion at a very young age – long before he moved to Amsterdam at 19 to pursue his art studies.

“In The Hague there was a store, the first store selling Chanel, and I would walk by and look at the windows and ask for lookbooks because the windows looked so pretty, so I was very interested in that,” he recalls fondly. “The ladies were very snobby, but they loved me and let me look at the clothes and the lookbooks. I was in elementary school.”

While he doesn’t necessarily attribute his experimental approach to his unconventional path – he never trained to be a fashion designer – Lantink agrees that taking a slightly different route ended up being an asset rather than a drawback.

“It was good to go to art school rather than fashion school because it gave me a different perspective on what I could do, and it opened up my mind about the meaning of clothing and of media and how I could play with that,” he says. “For some people fashion school really works; for others it’s art school. It’s really based on the person.”