On the eve of his third ready-to-wear show for Jean Paul Gaultier, I met the house’s creative director, Duran Lantink, at the company’s headquarters on Rue Saint-Martin. Lantink works on fittings with London-based stylist Jodie Barnes.
I walk up the stairs and join him in a familiar space; this is where the couture shows take place. (Sunday’s ready-to-wear show is held at the Palais de Tokyo.) In the white-walled room with its high ceiling, there’s a model walking in low-rise jeans and a voluminous white top.
“I like these jeans better than the ones before,” Barnes says. “Yes, and I like that the scorpion [the tattoo on the model’s belly] comes out,” Lantink adds.
Lantink was appointed creative director of the Puig-owned house in April 2025, assigned with leading both couture and ready-to-wear. Prior to his appointment, he helmed his eponymous label, founded in 2016, which joined the official fashion calendar in 2023.
Barnes started working with the designer back then. “I love his raw talent.
I think there’s a lot of freedom with him and the way he thinks, and I’m the same. Somehow, it comes together quite well,” she says.
It does. This season, the inspiration behind the collection is “finding different personalities within one character”, Lantink explains. “When you think of the Gaultier person, it’s somebody who can wear strict tailoring but also be sensual and a bit of a hippie.”
The same model comes back in a leather skirt and a checked shirt with little bells that jingle with each step. “I was inspired by a glove with tassels and bells that I found here in a closet, and it was a collection from 1989.
I thought the sound was amazing. And I like the idea of being quite loud as a Gaultier person — you enter the room and you’re quite loud.
So it’s kind of literal,” Lantink tells me.
If there’s one thing Lantink isn’t, it’s quiet. The 38-year-old designer had his big break in 2018, when American singer Janelle Monáe wore his “vagina pants” in her music video for “Pynk”.
His first ready-to-wear collection for Jean Paul Gaultier was daring, provocative, or “disturbing and full of clever mistakes,” as Vanity Fair European editorial director Simone Marchetti told Luke Leitch. Remember that hair-printed bodysuit, with its unabashedly frontal depiction of the male nude?
His sophomore show explored Jean Paul Gaultier’s extensive tailoring archive, blending it with his own signature conical shoulders and padded protrusions. There were also eye-popping T-shirts such as the one with the “glory” print, referring to the glory hole. A new “gooning” (Google it, if needed) T-shirt is part of the spring collection, but will not appear on the runway.
Did he try to make his third collection any more commercial? “There’s a bit more wearability in it.
That’s slowly where I want to go with the prêt-à-porter. But it also needs a certain amount of experimentation and understanding of which forms we want to introduce and want to make the house codes,” he says.
“That takes a bit of time. That’s the beautiful thing about Gaultier, the freedom to test and try things out and see where we want to push it into commercial versions.”
Completing his first couture collection, as well as his first pre-collection, also helped Lantink gain a clearer sense of direction. He explains that couture gives him the freedom to experiment with shapes, allowing him to translate those ideas into ready-to-wear pieces that feel more wearable.
And he is gradually building a wardrobe, something that naturally comes with developing pre-collections. “You have all these different collections, and somehow, you start understanding how you can divide those worlds and still be in one universe,” Lantink says.
Unlike most fashion houses, Jean Paul Gaultier doesn’t produce bags but is introducing shoes this season. “That’s something that we really want to go for. Since the pre-collection, we started selling shoes. And this model will be introduced this season,” Lantink says, pointing to the shoes arranged on the floor beneath the mood board. The new style appears in numerous colorways and several iterations — from flats to heels to lace-up versions.
After founder Jean Paul Gaultier’s retirement in 2020, the house’s couture business continued to thrive under a succession of high-profile guest designers, including Haider Ackermann, Nicolas Di Felice and Olivier Rousteing. Its ready-to-wear offering, however, was largely wound down, with the brand limiting itself to capsule collections.
Jean Paul Gaultier ready-to-wear is now available via 120 points of sale, and, since October 1, a pop-up at Galeries Lafayette. The 30-square-meter space on the second floor of the Parisian department store is a prime location at the top of the escalator, just next to Courrèges.
“We absolutely loved his Fall/Winter 2026 show,” says Galeries Lafayette chief merchandising officer Alix Morabito. “Duran is taking Jean Paul Gaultier’s creative approach and reinterpreting it for 2026.
It’s an iconic French brand with a very strong creative point of view.” The pop-up’s window showcases several of the sculptural gowns that closed the FW26 show.
The ability to experience and touch the clothes firsthand is key to how Lantink discovered fashion himself. Growing up in The Hague, the Netherlands, he would visit a store whose selection included designs by Gaultier, Alaïa, Mugler, and Maison Margiela.
“There was a tiny boutique, Puck & Hans, and it was completely filled with all these designer things,” Lantink recalls. His parents — his mother was an interior designer and his stepfather worked in the antiques trade — would wear Gaultier.
He remembers seeing them and their friends wear cone bras to parties. “I feel like we need to have these small curated boutiques in small towns to get everybody excited about fashion, so it becomes less generalized,” he says.
Lantink has been enjoying the support of fashion’s original enfant terrible, Jean Paul Gaultier. “We text, we have lunch together at his place,” Lantink says. Speaking of lunch, it’s 3pm, Lantink and Barnes, who hadn’t time to eat, are nibbling on pizza before getting back to the show fittings.