The Dutch designer (and Heroine 21 cover star) Duran Lantink is the new creative director of Jean Paul Gaultier. Lantink, who last year won LVHM’s prestigious Karl Lagerfeld Prize, has been a star designer on the rise for several seasons. He first turned heads with his early designs which brazenly appropriated materials from deadstock designer pieces, usually keeping the pieces’ identifying logos and branding on proud display. Recently, he pivoted his style towards unconventional, sculptural silhouettes, with his lumpy runways always bringing an element of playfulness to the Paris schedule.

In his appointment to Jean Paul Gaultier, Lantink feels like a natural successor to the founding designer’s spirit of iconoclastic fun. Speaking of Lantink, Gaultier said: “I see in him the energy, audacity, and playful spirit through fashion that I had at the beginning of my own journey: the new enfant terrible of fashion.” Enfant terrible, indeed. Just this past season, Lantink set the internet alight when he sent a male model down the runway wearing a silicon breastplate. It’s something you could easily imagine Gaultier himself doing in those early days.

Lantink will be taking over the brand’s ready-to-wear and haute couture lines. Despite not having presented haute couture before, with Lantink’s eye for sculptural designs, you have to imagine that he will thrive at it. In a statement, the designer said, “I consider Jean Paul Gaultier a genius and part of a generation that kicked down doors, so people like us can walk through them freely and be who we are without apology. Stepping into the role of Creative Director is a true honor. To me, Gaultier represents the ultimate house of creative spirit and savoir-faire. It’s provocative, and continuously pushing boundaries. It’s the brand that brings together different disciplines around fashion to create cultural movements, changing the language of clothes and how we wear them in the streets.”

Lantink’s first ready-to-wear collection for Jean Paul Gaultier will debut at Paris Fashion Week this coming September and his haute couture debut will take place during Haute Couture week in January 2026.