Duran Lantink is a designer whose interest lies in ‘clothing’ as opposed to ‘fashion’, fascinated by the nature of vintage, one-off pieces and the infinite ways they can transform and shapeshift. Embracing the same reconstructive approach to fashion he experimented with as a pre-teen growing up in The Hague and running with it, Lantink’s universe is defined by a circular design process, abstract silhouettes and an artistic instinct, resulting in garments which revel in the sublime and absurd. Distorting extremes has seen the designer become best known for his proportion play, amplifying shoulders and hips with voluminous padding, crafting tubular miniskirts that hover around the waist and head-to-toe bubble ensembles which bulge at the seams.

The Dutch designer made his Paris Fashion Week on-schedule debut two seasons ago, returning for FW24 to present Duran-Ski. Taking his opulent creations to the slopes of St. Moritz, Lantink invited us on a tongue-in-cheek ride through the world of après-ski, transforming archival silhouettes into streamlined body stockings, bulbous headgear and skimpy hotpants. As Lantink’s universe continues to evolve, his penchant for the eccentric endures, remaining steadfast to playfulness and experimentation in favour of playing it safe.

Ella Joyce: These past couple of years have been crazy for you, but first I wanted to take it back to your formative years. How did fashion accent your life growing up?
Duran Lantink: In so many different ways, there were always people dressing up around my childhood house before going to parties. There was [also] a moment with Firestarter by The Prodigy, and W&LT from Walter van Beirendonck [a label launched by Van Beirendonck in 1993], all these elements made me interested in fashion and gave me the ability to start dressing up, experimenting on my own body and create my own language. I was very young, I wasn’t even in high school then.

EJ: What was it like growing up in the Netherlands? Do you feel it influenced you creatively?
DL: I’m not sure, sometimes I’m annoyed that I wasn’t brought up in London or New York because it would have probably been easier. I don’t think it helped my creativity but I did have a nice youth, The Hague is next to the beach so I spent a lot of hours and days and months on the beach during the summer. I used to go to Ibiza during summer breaks when I was very young, from the age of seven or eight, and always saw people dressing up for parties and parades in the city. All those things made me want to be part of that type of culture, but The Hague isn’t a super creative city.

EJ: I’m interested to know more about your time studying at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, how did you find that environment?
DL: Gerrit Rietveld Academie was good because it’s very experimental. It’s a bit like CSM [Central Saint Martins], it wasn’t solely a fashion school it was more of a Fine Art school, it was very international, and all the classes were in English. It’s also a very stylish school, which is a bit annoying. [laughs] Before that I went to the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, which is a very school-like environment and it really didn’t work for me, Rietveld was very nice because they were quite free in their approach, you could come and go whenever you wanted. Although, the first two years were hard because my main focus was on repurposing old clothing pieces and they didn’t really agree on that. That was a fight in the beginning but after that, a new head of department came and he was very supportive of repurposing, which was good.

“It’s all a journey, you start with something and then it transforms into something completely different.”

EJ: Can you tell me about your repurposing approach and why circularity is so important to you?
DL: I’ve always been obsessed with clothing pieces rather than fabrics. It has always been very important to combine clothing pieces or see a jacket and think, “That could be an amazing pair of pants.” That’s how my mind works. I get inspired and try to create my own identity with them. Repurposing is circular but I also think about what happens if you buy a jacket from me and you don’t like that jacket anymore. We now have an opportunity on our website for people to bring it back and alter it into something else. Say you buy a jacket in 2024 and you don’t like the jacket in 2025, we can make sure it becomes a dress or a pair of hotpants. That’s the circularity we’re at now, we’re trying to figure out how to keep the things we made in the loop.

EJ: I’m glad you mentioned your website because it’s such a unique space. You offer a platform for customers to create their own page and sell one-off garments, and am I right in saying you used to send customers contracts smudged with your own blood too?
DL: Yes! I loved doing that, but now we’re selling in stores it becomes a bit harder. At a certain point, people were telling me I needed to do an NFT, and I was like, “Fuck no, I’m not doing an NFT.” I thought about how NFT means Non-Fungible Token, so you have something that is unique to you, which is a contract, so if I do a drop of my blood and push it in with my finger, you kind of have my DNA. It was my version of an NFT. [laughs] I still love that idea but we sold something to the Met’s Costume Institute and we were like, “Hey, by the way, we have this dumb contract…” They were like, “Does it contain real blood?” We were like, “Um, yeah?” And they were like, “That’s not allowed in the museum.” I need to continue that, I think it’s a good thing but I imagine selling thousands of things may be sad for my finger. [both laugh]

EJ: This is your second time as an LVMH prize finalist, how has that process been for you?
DL: It’s good to be in there because you meet the people you want to meet, it allows you to talk with all the designers, with people from LVMH. It’s really good for your network. I sound like an old man saying ‘network’. [both laugh] I’m really happy that I’m part of the LVMH Prize again.

EJ: You won the ANDAM Prize in early 2023, how did that help shape your brand? You also received mentorship from Chloé CEO Riccardo Bellini.
DL: It’s really important because doing a show in Paris is not cheap, even though people are supporting, it is still a lot of money and I’m not a super commercial brand so it’s not that I’m going to Paris to try and get mega sales. I’m trying to land in Paris, to communicate my language and show my DNA. It’s a journey and it slowly needs to grow, meaning you have to make big financial investments and with no financial backing – it is hard. The money from the Prize is great and having a mentorship with Riccardo Bellini is also really great, it gave me the opportunity to talk about things and he can help, he can connect you with people. ANDAM was really good for me, it’s different because it’s a smaller audience.

EJ: Moving to show on schedule in Paris as opposed to off-schedule, you’re working to tighter deadlines and you’re on a more global stage, what has that shift been like for you?
DL: I kind of love it, to be honest. I’m scared for the day I don’t like it anymore… [both laugh] But I still do, I think it’s great. I have so many things I want to do and so many ideas. The ‘drone show’ [Duran’s FW21 show replaced the front row with drones] was my first show on my own and those types of ideas and conceptual shows are what I would really love to do but unfortunately, I just don’t have the budget. I have been really enjoying it, Paris is the place to be if you want to show.

EJ: Speaking of those more conceptual show ideas, does it feel like things are shifting away from the more traditional show set-up? How do you see that format evolving?
DL: I have a million ideas for conceptual shows. I’m not a designer who only does clothes and that’s where it stops, it’s really about creating a world. I tried doing exhibitions, I tried doing videos, I tried doing a store installation, I tried doing lookbooks. I tried doing all these different things but in the end, doing a show is the holy grail. It makes you very excited, it’s exhausting but there is an energy because people come in, there’s choreography, there’s music, all these elements come together to make a traditional way of showing very exciting.

EJ: It must be so satisfying for you to see that end product come to life. You’ve designed pieces for some incredible people, including Beyoncé, Troye Sivan, Billie Eilish, and those pants for Janelle Monáe’s PYNK music video in 2018… [both laugh]
DL: Vagina pants!

EJ: The vagina pants! Is there anyone else you’d love to dress? Is it more about a certain energy when you design as opposed to a specific person per se?
DL: I’m actually having a lot of these conversations lately because I like artists but I don’t have a celebrity- minded focus. It’s a new journey for me, sometimes we have a conversation about who I’m designing for and people ask, “Who’s the woman? Who’s the non-binary person?” But, do they have to exist already? Or am I creating a person? If we go through celebrities I like, I like Isabelle Huppert, Monica Bellucci, all those legendary people, but I don’t think, “Oh I want to dress them.” I love all the girls I work with, there’s a girl I really like at the moment called Ella McCutcheon, she has the right energy, she’s young, she’s fresh, she’s an intellect. I don’t have a specific person but I do like to think about it a lot, I might find someone one day.

EJ: Before we get into your FW24 collection, for the past few years you and Jan Hoek [visual artist] have gone back and forth to Cape Town to collaborate with a group of homeless queer and transgender sex workers and their community-support NGO, SWEAT [Sex Workers Education and Advisory Task Force]. It seems a really important project and I’d love to speak about how it came about.
DL: Absolutely. Jan Hoek and I graduated around the same time in 2014 and we really wanted to work together but we didn’t know how. We found this picture of Coco and Molly – a random picture on I-don’t-know- where – who we thought looked amazing. They were wearing net stockings, they were completely wasted and we were like, “Oh my god, who are these girls? We need to find them.” We found out that they were living in Cape Town and we wanted to find the community they were living in. So, we got a grant from the Dutch government to go there and saw that Long Street was where they were partying so we took a tequila and started looking for them. Everyone was like, “It’s Cape Town, don’t do that,” but we were like, “Fuck it, we’re going for it.” It turned out they’re trans sex workers and Coco was like, “Oh my god, I’m going to show you to my girlfriends,” and we ended up with their community. We wanted to work together to highlight that they’re amazing human beings, highlight their creativity and celebrate them. We expected to find two or three girls but in the end, we have 25 girls in SWEAT, which is a safe space for transgender sex workers. We decided to do a project where everybody could write down their dream of what they wanted to be. It was amazing, for instance, [one of them] wished to be a bride but because she was trans she thought it would never happen for her there. She said, “For me to be a bride one day would be my biggest dream,” so we made a huge wedding dress and Jan and I ‘married’ her. Coco wanted to be the fire of the Statue of Liberty, for liberation, and Cleopatra wanted to be Cleopatra as the first female ruler in Africa. After all of these amazing dreams, we were able to do a photoshoot with them, we did workshops on how to repurpose clothing pieces and they were actually doing the same thing I was, so we really connected there. We’ve been working with them for over seven years now, two years ago we did a show in Cape Town with them because they all live under a bridge near the Castle of Good Hope, which is a colonial Dutch building but they all call themselves Duchess and Queen Mary, so they finally were the owners of the building for a day. We have a video coming out in December this year, we also made a magazine with them. It’s a collaboration that is very close to my heart. I think it’s very important to celebrate different communities, give them a stage and also pay them. It’s not only good for them, it’s also really good for me, and we try to keep the connection rolling but it’s hard because their living situation isn’t great.

EJ: It’s a testament to you building such trust with the community.
DL: Thank you, I’m really excited about the film in December.

“It’s very important to celebrate different communities, give them a stage and also pay them.”

EJ: Let’s jump into FW24, I was at your show in Paris and it was amazing.
DL: Did you like it?!

EJ: I loved it. It was called Duran-Ski, how did the idea of winter sports come into your world?
DL: For me, it’s always bizarre to have a seasonal show because I’ve never done that before – I’ve never in my life done anything that concerns a season. [laughs] I’ve always called my collections ‘Springsummerautumnwinter’, but when you’re on the schedule it literally says Spring/Summer and Autumn/ Winter so you have to work on a season. We were joking around and thinking, “OK, so I guess this season is about winter sports?” But, with hotpants, obviously. [both laugh] Ski was the first thing we thought of, we were just like, “Let’s do a Duran Ski collection,” my friend always calls me Duranski in a, “Hey Duranski,” way. [laughs] I thought it was interesting because ski culture is a bizarre culture, it’s very exclusive. Obviously, you have other types of skiers, but the majority are St. Moritz, Gstaad, all the people who prefer lunch over actual skiing. I was trying to play with those alpine things, shapes and skiwear, making a ski body stocking for men. It’s taking the piss out of ski culture a bit in a fun way, imagining a crazy world where everybody is fabulous in their ski outfits.

EJ: What kind of references did you look to when building Duran-Ski?
DL: I start with a rack of clothing pieces and I happen to have a lot of vintage things in my studio so we just get out everything that makes sense to me, there was a Dutch fireman’s sock in there so we recreated all those socks and made boots out of it. I’ve been working with a Dutch archivist for the past two seasons, so he gave me a lot of knits and a lot of antique underwear, we experimented with that. It’s really about experimenting and trying to figure things out through what we have in the studio. It’s a different approach to designing. This season I’m doing a bit more reference work and more research before we start the collection.

EJ: That puzzle-piecing side to it is so interesting. Is it instinct? Do you immediately look at something and just know what it could turn into?
DL: Yeah, absolutely! It’s instinct, it just works for me.

EJ: You introduced recycled materials this season with lycra and wool, what was it like working with them? I’m presuming that was so you’re able to scale the collection.
DL: Definitely, it’s very important because in the past we have only worked with unique pieces. I need to sustain the whole business side of things, so we researched recycled lycra and recycled wool, we’re trying to implement these into the collection so we can scale the whole thing up.

EJ: You briefly mentioned the upcoming season, what can we expect to see?
DL: I don’t really know what we’re doing. [laughs] At this point in our preparation we’re really feeling the whole boho-chic thing, but that might be eliminated in the end. It’s more the spiritual side of boho-chic. It’s all a journey, you start with something and then it transforms into something completely different.

Interview originally published in Heroine 21.

model NAOMI APAJOK at SELECT MODEL PARIS;
hair RIMI URA;
make-up ANNA SADAMORI;
manicurist TESSIDY SOLEIL;
casting CLARE RHODES at CASTING BY US;
digi-operator REBECCA LIÈVRE;
photography assistants ALEXIS PERRENIN and EMIL KOSUGE;
fashion assistant AVEYNET BEZO;
production SILIVIA ROJAS;
production assistant JADE PAIN SOURAYA