Jean Paul Gaultier Appoints Duran Lantink as the Brand’s Creative Director

Jean Paul Gaultier’s seasons-long experiment with substitute couture designers has officially ended. On Tuesday, the Puig-owned French House named Dutch designer Duran Lantink as its new permanent creative director.

Lantink will take over both ready-to-wear and couture production for JPG. His first ready-to-wear presentation will take place at Paris Fashion Week in September, while he will debut couture in January 2026.

“I see in him the energy, audacity, and playful spirit through fashion that I had at the beginning of my own journey,” Gaultier said of Lantink, even going so far as to call Lantink, “the new enfant terrible of fashion,” a name once bestowed upon Gaultier. “Welcome, Duran.”

Lantink was born in 1988 and grew up in The Hague, raised by a single mother who had a habit of collecting—fittingly—Jean Paul Gaultier (as well as Maison Margiela, a former Gaultier design assistant). He went on to attend the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and then Sandberg Instituut and received a bachelor’s and master’s in fashion from the Amsterdam institutions. He experienced a bit of a big break when Janelle Monáe wore his “vagina pants” in her 2018 “Pynk” music video. In 2019 he was shortlisted for the LVMH Prize. He would go on to be named a finalist in 2024, and take home the Karl Lagerfeld Prize that year. Earlier this month, he was presented with the 2025 Woolmark Prize, with Donatella Versace calling him “a clear winner.”

Throughout his relatively short career, Lantink has dressed Billie Eilish, Doja Cat, and Beyoncé for her “Love Yourself in Love” Tiffany & Co. campaign. Most recently, his fall 2025 show at Paris Fashion Week caused quite a stir when male model Chandler Frye closed the presentation in a large set of prosthetic breasts. “It’s always been really important for me to play like a child and see what comes out of it,” Lantink told W in 2023.

"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,” Lantink said in a statement. “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.”

Ever since Gaultier retired in 2020, the House has enlisted a new designer each season to present a couture collection, combining their respective aesthetic with the JPG house codes. Haider Ackermann, Simone Rocha, and Glenn Martens are just some of the names that took on the task over the past few years, creating a good amount of buzz around both the brand and the designer. After their collaborations, Ackermann was named the new creative director of Tom Ford while Martens was elevated to the same position at Maison Margiela.

In the meantime, the brand’s ready-to-wear operation has relied mostly on capsules and collaborations in lieu of runway collections. The decision to end the rotational couture program and reunite the two sides of the brand is likely a bid to bring some stability back to its overall image.

“There’s a real demand for Jean Paul Gaultier, young people in particular are in step with its values,” said JPG Managing Director Antoine Gagey in a statement to Business of Fashion. “We’re at a stage where we need more consistency across categories and seasons.”

Unfortunately, this does mean Lantink’s namesake line will be put on pause for the time being as he focuses on his new gig. “Duran is something that won’t disappear,” he said. “I’m still very eager to explore its possibilities—when the time feels right, and when I feel ready and confident that I can take on multiple things without compromising the quality.”