Gaultier (in/out)side the Archive
Lantink's Polarizing Couture Ourobouros
Reading the reactions to Duran Lantink’s first Jean Paul Gaultier Couture show, I found myself surprised to see… positive reactions? The praise quickly eclipsed Lantink’s divisive, needling first ready to wear outing, and seemed to meet rather than subvert the industry’s excitement. Couture week magnifies everything about fashion, from price to glamour to sin, and this becomes a ripe moment to criticize, celebrate, and consider. For Lantink, this distinction between couture and ready to wear seems to redefine his place in fashion, and what he is attempting with Gaultier.
Perhaps it was just the words “Gaultier Couture,“ but I found myself reminiscing about Gaultier’s much lauded guest designed couture shows organized over the last decade; an opportunity for a star designer to filter their codes through the aging enfant terrible. More cynically, a way to keep Gaultier viral. They were instantly canonized (the Glenn Martens nude print suit is in this years Met costume exhibit) and critically adored. Here was Lantink throwing in his take, as high concept, high shock, and high fashion as Simone Rocha’s or Sacai’s.
Gaultier’s post-departure pre-Lantink ready to wear on the other hand, received none of this praise. It barely received attention. It’s anonymously and algorithmically designed, cheap, and expensive - a veritable 2010s Helmut Lang. Was Lantink’s Gaultier ready-to-wear primed to be disrespected?
Duran Lantink’s namesake brand is an exercise in nudity, blob dresses, and four-figure high-concept extravagance. It makes sense then that fashion would enjoy Lantink frolicking in couture, a world purely of ideas and deep walleted adventurers. His brand was always ready-to-wear by technicality, which then became the biggest criticism of his Gaultier ready to wear debut.
Lantink’s attitude certainly didn’t help, he claimed to have purposefully avoided the Gaultier archive - the same archive being mined endlessly for cheap ready to wear. I was interested in this idea. A bold, albeit haughty rejection of the archive as an opportunity to filter legacy through affect alone: a designer understood through gut and punctum. One might call the whole statement a narcissistic scheme if not for it being probably a lie. The archive references in the show were startlingly specific. Critics did not care, or were otherwise unamused.
This statement haunted Lantink’s first shows. Lantink was branding himself as an unreliable narrator, a stinker taking on Gaultier’s prankster disdain. This logic allowed Gaultier to haunt the most obvious Lantinkisms as aura, while goading the superfans to dig deeper and find the reference look.
His challenge for couture was to exercise his skill in the medium of high concept fashion art - the real reason he was hired - while simultaneously convincing the nerds that he could deliver a classic Gaultier that reflects his legacy, canon, and archive. But then, just as Lantink’s ready to wear was doomed from the start, perhaps his couture would always be given more grace.
For couture, Lantink reversed course, claiming his archive pulls and stating a concrete theme: Marie Antoinette. Lantink is a jokester for this - Antoinette is perhaps as thematically derivative as the archival recreation is in modern fashion, a symbol so broad and oversaturated as to become a non-symbol. Antoinette becomes as broad and affective a concept to interpret as Gaultier, the literalism of an archive piece or a historic brocade lost in Lantink’s vision. It’s true that the dresses were large, historic Versailles brocade abounded, and red velvet blanketed bombers and gowns. Still, Antoinette (and Gaultier’s) presence seemed less literally found in dresses resembling pipes gushing colored tulle from the sides, fronts, backs, and chests of models. There were high cropped bolero bombers, Frankensteined leather racing jackets, and coats of fringe, fur, and pleats. It pleased those who wanted Gaultier, and those searching for more than a parade of archive reinterpretation.
By his third show, Lantink seemed to know how to manipulate the expectations placed upon him, to use his oxymoronic qualifiers as a way to change the conversation around his work. In the spirit of Rei Kawakubo, Lantink says just enough to confuse, redirect, and ultimately allow his clothes to do the talking. They seemingly refuse over-intellectualization or being relegated to costume art. And it worked. “They” - more than those paid to - liked the couture. He found the balance of presenting an unpalatable newness wrapped in the respectability of archival references.
The question lingering was as old as Lantink’s namesake silicone breast look, and his Gaultier debut’s hairy nude print jumpsuit: does Lantink design for or against the female body? His garments often obscure the body or turn it into a joke. Lantink has stripped and reformed gendered dress - the suit, the gown - into just as much of a joke, a more progressive and egalitarian concept. This gives me optimism that Lantink’s biting disregard for body and gender speaks to a less gendered vision of couture, of clothing as a way to bring the body outside of itself and into a realm of art. Lantink’s “jokes” reveal just how old fashioned our understanding of clothing is, how conservative it is in its binaries, and how much further along its wearers are in their understandings of gender.
The purpose of these jokes beyond wearing could be what Frank Ruda describes as comic utopianism. Ruda writes that the aim of comic utopianism is “to enable us to to do, think, and imagine the impossible. Its slogan may be: where the impossible lies, there also grows that which makes you laugh away your fear of change.” This is why I believe Lantink’s Gaultier goes beyond a viral moment, beyond mere concept. It inspires, at least in me, new jokes on new bodies.
Still, there is a pragmatic group wondering if these rejections translate to a realistic, immediately practical form of dress. As Rian Phin points out in a since deleted tweet, if women do feel isolated by Lantink’s design and in response do not buy it, that is Lantink’s burden to bear. Gaultier, meanwhile, found plenty to criticize his work as hypersexual, costumey, and unwearable, and yet he found mainstream success. We still don’t know if Lantink’s Gaultier will.
Lantink is one of the few young voices afforded the ability to show couture on a large, well funded scale. For all his progressive futurism he is a member of fashion’s most well represented creative director phenotype: thirty-something white gay man embedded in club culture. Perhaps the real appeal of Gaultier’s guest shows was giving young designers a fleeting opportunity to design with a 90s budget and couture resources. Paying obligatory dues to Gaultier’s archive was an invitation to experiment on a now extinct scale. As the permanent replacement, Lantink had to prove he could do more.
Almost every newly appointed creative director in fashion, from Anderson’s titanic Dior down, have been in conversation with the archive. Each debut and follow up is an endless discourse of balancing old client with new, ways to pass off someone else’s codes as theirs, and an attempt at safe viral moments. Cathy Horyn used Pier Paolo Piccioli’s couture debut for Balenciaga as a good opportunity to skewer this pattern, writing“[he] essentially reprised the volumes, drama, and colors he was known for as Valentino’s creative director, with Balenciaga attachments — a severe line here, a balloon skirt there.” Later she adds, “he wanted to embrace Cristobal’s principles, but do they matter if the results look out of touch with reality?” She’s right. The people Piccoli is selling to could wear the Cristobal Balenciaga designs Piccioli is lifting, and they’d likely be cheaper than Balenciaga couture prices. They don’t.
What feels gauche about PPP’s Balenciaga is the grasp for relevancy and cash with such dated ideas. There’s a clear rift between designers reshaping their houses with firm ideas, great clothes, and an articulated client, and those grasping for relevancy being propelled by a media machine. Even as critics scorn the safe, commercial archive copies, they are just as likely to scorn originality out of context (this has been the case since Mcqueen’s Givenchy, Margiela’s Hermes, etc.) What fashion houses refuse to internalize is the accessibility and originality of vintage/archive fashion. It has never been easier to find and purchase a designer’s source garment. True modern fashion operates based off of this understanding.
This is the crux of why I enjoy Lantink’s Couture. He uses the archive invisibly as a way to satisfy fans, while diverting attention to new forms, new shapes, and tough ideas. He seems, despite protest, still enamored with a Gaultier of affect. A Gaultier vibe with which to launch an expansive fashion futurism. Archive Gaultier will always be there for its fans, but Lantink is dedicated to hopefully offering something uncomfortably new.
