STRIPE TEASE

Duran Lantink takes the reins at Jean Paul Gaultier with a boundary-pushing debut that stays true to its founder's unconventional approach

- DAL CHODHA

In these tightly corseted times, how do you build on a legacy bursting with nudity, sexuality and provocation? Duran Lantink faced this very challenge 12 months ago, when he took up residence on the top floor of Jean Paul Gaultier's ex-ribbon factory, ex-boxing gym, ex-nightclub Paris HQ as the label's new creative director. Arriving with a whiff of the enfant terrible after a solid six-year run of mischievous ready-to-wear collections under his own name, the Dutch designer was well primed to arouse both criticism and adulation.

The opening look of his debut S/S26 collection for Gaultier, held in Paris this past October, yanked the iconography of Madonna’s cone bra through a funhouse media landscape until it emerged like an extraterrestrial slap. The house’s iconic inked body sleeves were now in three dimensions. Trench coats were sliced; the sailor stripes of the house’s torso-shaped Le Male fragrance bottle elongated and warped. Tops clung to the body with telephone receiver-shaped clasps. Lantink wasn't delivering a polite, earnest homage: as soon as the livestream cut, talking head videos quickly began circulating online with commentators wondering if what he'd shown was a simple case of rage-baiting. In their animated search for meaning, fashion fans were left picking through the debris of an industry they had held onto through fuzzy VHS tapes of 1990s shows and pages scanned from glossy millennial magazines.

In an age when even the dullest algorithm could stitch together a decent Gaultier fantasy from nautical uniforms, conical bras and tattooed mesh, Lantink’s decision to turn away from the archives was fittingly rebellious. Speaking to Vogue after the show, Gaultier himself said: 'I was only smelling the spirit of the time.