Duran Lantink (Q2974)
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Duran Lantink is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Duran Lantink |
Duran Lantink is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
It was standing room only at Duran Lantink’s show. The Dutch designer picked up LVMH’s Karl Lagerfeld Prize earlier this month, so his early adopters were joined by people curious to discover what the LVMH jury saw in him. If I had to guess, I would say it’s his flair for the surreal and a commitment to his unique vision. The Lagerfeld Prize recognizes the “creativity of young brands.”There’s an absurdist streak running through the spring collections, a rejection of the straight and narrow and the safety that designers, who’ve been buffeted by strong economic headwinds, have been pursuing lately. This season, they have turned to risk-taking, ingenuity, and fun. Lantink has represented all of that since the COVID days, when he used drone footage to make one of the pandemic era’s most creative fashion films to showcase his repurposed unsold designer clothes.In the seasons since, he’s pivoted his focus to extremes of silhouette, shaping an avant-garde aesthetic that, despite its exaggeration of form—or maybe because of it—is now resonating IRL on the street. Model Rianne Van Rompaey, who is also Dutch, was at the show today in a cropped black leather bomber with linebacker padding on the shoulders and upper torso, which is one of Lantink’s signatures.This season, the designer went to the beach, inserting inner tubes of padding in one-piece swimsuits and adding several cup sizes and generous uplift to bikini tops. Full-body bodysuits, meanwhile, were padded at the joints, making the models resemble insects or aliens—weird stuff. Other looks were accessorized with handbags worn as bonnets, the straps tucked under the chin. It was almost as if Lantink was compensating for the more commercial instincts of the T-shirt fabric he used for a slouchy trench and corset-waist dresses. “It was really important to think a bit more about wearability, but still in a very fun way,” he said.The exceptional silver jewelry belonged to Carla Sozzani and was made by her companion, Kris Ruhs. The sculptural necklaces claimed space in a similar way to Lantink’s bold designs.
29 September 2024
Duran Lantink spent two precious days in the lead-up to his fall show at the LVMH Prize, presenting his work to the jury and hundreds of other people across the industry. He was a finalist in 2019 as well, but after a breakthrough spring 2024 collection he came back for another go at the competition. His spring collection was noteworthy for its exploration of shape. Lantink built up shoulders and hips with padding, and extended the appearance of the torso with stretchy body stockings. Stylists went a bit crazy for it. The extreme proportions of the garments make for great photos.Lantink’s fall collection is a follow-up, only here, instead of delving into such summery essentials as bathing suits and lifesavers, he trained his attention on wintery gear like ski sweaters, long johns, and cozy wool socks, complemented by some power tailoring. “We’re really trying to figure out new ways of presenting clothes, creating new shapes and forming a new identity,” he said. Using padding, he exaggerated the shoulders on both a sweater dress and a single-breasted jacket by bringing them forward, and thickened the chest and back on cropped jackets in leather or upcycled puffer nylons to Mr. Incredible dimensions.The shapes aren’t easy to achieve. “They’re very labor intensive,” he allowed, “but I’m kind of a romantic thinker in that way. From my perspective, I don’t think that it’s something only conceptual.” Still, he has to think about commerciality, so on smaller pieces like sweater vests and button-downs he inserted a good inch or inch-and-a-half of foam between two layers of fabric, sometimes slicing them horizontally or diagonally to show off their unusual thickness.There’s strength and humor in these pieces, not to mention ingenuity. But what about less romantic thinkers? Or customers not as inclined to bulk up? The Prize jury will have wanted to know how he can grow his niche audience. A navy peacoat spliced with undyed shearling sleeves (made from cast-offs deemed unusable due to small imperfections) looked like a cool jumping-off point for next time.
3 March 2024
Duran Lantink’s namesake label is built around sustainability, and in July he won the ANDAM Special Prize for it. But for his first official, on-calendar PFW outing, the Dutch designer somehow managed to draw attention away from the now-expected deadstock-upcycled-repurposed talking points to make a larger statement.“At the moment I’m really experimenting, trying to find my handwriting,” he said backstage before the show. “I started with combining clothes and pieces, and now I am really thinking about shape.”Lantink hasn’t tackled seasons before, so summer opened with mod floral prints in nylon made from repurposed plastic bottles and, logically enough, a water theme, notably lifesavers. Picking up where his last collection left off, he sent out pneumatic silhouettes, from a curvaceous, artificially puffed-up sheath dress to floating necklines, itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny “bubble jeans” bottoms, and tops resembling floating devices known in France as “frites” (fries), though the show notes called them “tubular objects d’art.” A lifejacket was cleverly worked into a forest green bomber. A whale’s tail became a dress—make that half a dress, since the back was pretty much just a veiled backside.Speaking of veils, a 19th century silk one was paired with a traditional Dutch bonnet to become a sundress; a vintage macramé tablecloth got a similar treatment. Both were charming. Other hybrids included a cage dress made of a sliced black T-shirt, knit deadstock and a piece of a skirt worn over a white bubble top; an experiment in three-dimensionality, the designer explained.“Speedo-jeans” were another attempt at something new. Those starred the classic men’s swim briefs spliced with vintage jeans and hand-knitted leg warmers. Elsewhere, jeans or knits were bisected with tulle inserts, then reassembled again. A white vintage Helmut Lang coat from the astronaut collection of fall 1999 likewise was bisected and reassembled anew. Slipped amid all these experiments was some solid tailoring: a beige hooded jacket, an ecru suit, liquid pajamas.But Lantink’s focus is solidly on questioning our relationship to traditional clothing. The final number, a black hourglass cut-out dress with hook-like shoulders, was a case in point. Even before the designer revealed, post-show, that the Met Costume Institute, the V&A and the Stedelijk museum have all acquired his work for their permanent collections, this outing gave its audience plenty to think about.
3 October 2023
Duran Lantink is among a handful of young designers who are coming in with a bang. The first signs emerged just pre-pandemic, with those trousers for Janelle Monaé’s “Pynk” video. A few months back, Lantink turned heads again with a couple of shiny coats, on Beyoncé (gold, for that Tiffany ad) and Lizzo (silver).Last month, he made the big leap to high fashion’s epicenter, moving into a “really tiny” apartment in a really tony Paris arrondissement. That shift put the 35 year-old Dutch designer in mind of the accoutrements of moving house, from prosaic considerations like backpacks, doormats and car mats to existential ones like what you should keep and what could use a rethink.Lantink’s Paris debut for fall was also his first IRL show, which forced the designer to channel his million-ideas-a-minute ways—hence the guided meditation soundtrack and incense—and let guests see his process up close. Turns out that was key, because there was a lot going on in back, where thick backpack straps became belts and fastenings. That car mat? Lantink wrapped it into a bodice. Khaki trousers sourced from surplus in Amsterdam became the midriff on a halter dress with a pleated neck and skirt. Buttery shearling, worked into plush coats or boots, was also deadstock from back home.Experimental ideas included “mushroomy” shoulders, or a beige calico coat that the designer hung in the Hermitage museum a year ago and invited visitors to decorate themselves. An exaggerated hourglass trench sprang from using digital technology to liquefy the shape, the said Lantink, but the result seemed to land a comment about body positivity while simultaneously needling iconic brands in London, Paris, and Tokyo.It’s always fun to be in on a joke, but Lantink also makes as convincing a case as anyone for the commercial appeal of repurposing, something he’s been doing since he was 12-years-old. (His first “show,” at 15, involved his grandmother’s pleated skirt, one of her tablecloths, and an old pair of his father’s Diesel jeans.) Here, a gold dress from his first collection was reborn as a corset. A coat was made of no less than five vintage bomber jackets. The last dress alone, pieced together from his mother’s Prada jacket, a vintage Miu Miu dress and a top donated by fellow designer Kim Ellery, shows why Lantink has caught the attention of stores like H. Lorenzo, Joyce Hong Kong, Concrete, and the rest of the industry, too.
6 March 2023
Well, here’s another first in the collection-review stakes: I am a drone, circling hundreds of feet above the Netherlands, and about to swoop in on Duran Lantink and his inaugural “spring-summer-autumn-winter” ’21 runway show. Excuse me while I loop the loop in search of the designer. Ah, there he is, Duran-as-drone, hovering in wait over the sweeping façade of the 17th-century Dutch royal Soestdijk Palace. I can see some fellow guests are buzzing in too: Hi!Of all the schemes that designers have come up with during the pandemic, Lantink’s surely counts as one of the most hilarious alternatives to ye olde practice of “flying in” editors, celebs, and influencers. And aptly super low on the carbon-footprint comparison too, for Lantink’s mind is a fashion-sustainability reengineering mechanism. He’s been, ah, piloting his upcycling methods—repurposing unsold designer-label clothes in his pioneering, cheeky way—since 2013. But this is his first runway show…and we’re coming in to land.Full disclosure: During this trip, I’m at home in London, and Lantink is chatting over his airborne video as we virtually zoom in to see his models parading through the back rooms of the palace. Wiggling his wings in greeting, he explains that appropriately enough, the former hunting lodge of the Dutch royal family is itself currently being repurposed by the Meyer Beckman Foundation as a center for platforming made-in-Holland sustainable manufacturing solutions. It’s opening in 2024. Duran Lantink is the first to get through its doors.“We’re here 30 kilometers outside Amsterdam,” he begins. “That’s where I have my studio. It’s pretty huge, and I’ve got it for 300 euros a month as an anti-squat rent. Basically, during lockdown, I had time to work with my assistant, Thibault, on all the materials I had left over from collaborations with stores and brands, and to come up with this, our first runway collection.” Thibault is in the show, wearing, in one of his exits, a swishing lemon yellow dress that is reconstructed from another dress which had been left over from Lantink’s collaboration with Ellery last year. The point was to give him free rein to recycle and give new life to their unsold inventory.As we buzz around his collection, Lantink points out how he’s unpicked, restyled, and refashioned multiple piles of clothes lying around his studio which “used to be” garments by Balmain, Balenciaga, Prada, Proenza Schouler, Vetements, Marine Serre, and many more.
“In the beginning, we started with stores to see how we could work with their deadstock to see how we could stop their clothes going into landfill. And that was the beginning of thinking how we could create a completely new form of business.”
13 May 2021