THE SCULPTOR: DURAN LANTINK

DURAN LANTINK’S EXTREME SILHOUETTES CAST THE BODY IN NEW LIGHT. THE DUTCH DESIGNER MAKES GARMENTS FOR A WORLD THAT’S ENTIRELY HIS OWN.

By Osman Ahmed

I first met the smiley, baseball cap-wearing designer Duran Lantink in Berlin, just before the pandemic. He asked me to bring some items from my wardrobe that I wouldn’t mind him cutting up and making into something entirely new. In 2019, that was his thing.

As a young graduate of prestigious fashion programs at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, he was making a name for himself working with some of the world’s best boutiques, turning their unsold clothes into new garments, which often looked intentionally spliced-together: Cubist sartorial collages juxtaposing logos, textures, and genres of clothing. I can’t remember what I gave him, but what returned was a Frankensteinian kimono, incredibly ornate, which, truthfully, has had less wear than the original pieces.

Back then, there was a lot of chatter about fashion’s environmental impact and how designers should be doing more about it—something we were in Berlin to talk about, ironically flown in by a department store for a week-long sustainability extravaganza.

In hindsight, that moment in time turned out like that Mark Twain quote: “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” As the pandemic paused IRL fashion shows and store openings, the chatter turned to all the ways the industry would change once things reopened. Fewer collections, more upcycling, zero waste. Plus ça change, et cetera. Except things didn’t quite stay the same. They snowballed into a much bigger spectacle with a much larger impact. Most designers, editors, and buyers gave up on their promises to do better.

Duran, meanwhile, was back in Amsterdam after a faltered attempt at relocating to London. He was rethinking his entire approach to that dreaded combination of words: “sustainable fashion.” The boutiques that had provided him with deadstock clothes revoked their promises to supply him, due to the pandemic. It turned out to be a blessing.

“I started looking more into vintage pieces and thinking about the silhouette of iconic clothing—how I can change that and how I can create my own language,” he tells me over Zoom. “I never had the luxury of thinking about the collection as one story, because I got pieces from a shop and then needed to create something out of it.”

In 2023, Duran began showing in Paris, debuting his new look: a cleaner, more focused wardrobe of archetypal clothes with extreme proportions. It expanded on themes found in his earlier hybrid collections, except nothing was ostensibly collaged. A white t-shirt looked inflated, almost like a balloon, cartoonishly seamless. By the next collection, he had doubled down: denim speedos and Breton-striped bikinis standing away from the body, coats that looked like paper-doll cut-outs, a sculpted Jessica Rabbit dress with a hyper-exaggerated bust and hips, white-and-banker blue shirts with perpendicular shoulders stretching up to the ears.

His work caught the attention of the fashion industry, especially stylists who recognized how visually striking his clothes appeared in photos; he was invited to compete twice for the LVMH Prize, taking home the Karl Lagerfeld Prize in 2024. He’s moving to Paris this year to be closer to the action.

You can see why the pashas of the luxury conglomerate were interested in his work. Duran had also begun experimenting with padding and metal frames to create extreme silhouettes—and with every collection since, he has refined them to appear less superfluous. It’s testament to his skill at making old clothes appear ultra-modern, poking a bit of fun at fashion’s obsession with timelessness—quiet luxury, or whatever you want to call it—and the conspiracy that designer clothes are meant to last a lifetime, and yet, as Duran knows so well, often end up in the landfill.

“Shaping and transforming the body with classic clothes is how I started thinking about it, especially with parts where you can create something new, like the knees or the hips,” he explains. Duran is in his studio in Amsterdam, where he and his team make 80 percent of his collections, starting with digital rendering on Photoshop and meticulously finishing by hand. As he scales up his business, selling his wares in Dover Street Market and various department stores, he will start working with specialist factories. They’ve often gone quiet on him, perhaps due to the complex methods of production required for his neo-Space Age wardrobe staples.

Beyond craftsmanship, there is an element of absurd surrealism that runs through Duran’s work—percolating more broadly in fashion for some time now—capturing the zeitgeist of post-pandemic style. Perhaps because of the way that fashion shows are consumed: iPhone-shot videos and photos flood our timelines for weeks on end, capturing a dizzying circus of guests and gimmicks. Something about Duran’s work, always a little bit tongue-in-cheek, eloquently satirizes fashion’s absurdity and its homogenization.

There’s also the broader world it seems to reflect: the rise of AI-generated imagery, the Facetune phenomenon, the mainstreaming of exaggerated features and body parts thanks to easily-accessible injectables and surgery packages, and plenty of firsthand TikTok accounts of it all. Lip fillers, Brazilian butt lifts, doll-like lashes, corsets, and extra-long porcelain talons have all become de rigeur, so much so we don’t notice anymore. Bodies have become canvases for transformation, and Duran’s work plays into that—prodding and questioning the extremities of our own desires.

“In daily life, you pick these things up, and it will eventually be part of your work,” he says. “It’s never been on a mood board or anything, but subconsciously, we’re all living in it, right? You get inspired by these weird body shapes, or artificial intelligence, or filters. Even now, like, I don’t look like this—apparently, Zoom automatically filters so that I don’t have any eye bags!”

It goes back to his childhood, growing up in The Hague. His young mother would go out with her drag queen friends, who Duran watched get ready together. His grandmother would babysit, helping him make clothes for his Barbie from her old curtains. By the age of 10, he had bright pink hair and piercings, and was constantly experimenting with his own style, encouraged by his family but questioned by his peers.

“The mainstream is just not something I care too much for, style-wise,” he asserts, looking to nightlife and subculture as Northern Stars. “I always found the people you don’t see so much more interesting than everyone walking in the street. I remember the Walter Van Beirendonck 1996 collection, where suddenly my eyes were open. I was like, There’s this world of people that do believe there could be more excitement towards fashion and clothes.”

Commercialism, that dreaded word, is something people often ask him about. Who will buy his clothes? Where will they wear them? Duran is a hopeful romantic, he says, and believes these questions will work themselves out. Besides, there’s a far deeper resonance to his mission.

“If you reflect on the times, where we are craving escapism, all of us are trying to create this world that is quite perfect and positive and acceptable and free,” he says. “ I think, now more than ever, we need that.”