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As the end of this epic season of debuts neared, it seemed less and less likely that fashion would get the disruption it so craved. That is until we descended into the bowels of the Musée du quai Branly for Duran Lantink’s first show for Jean Paul Gaultier.

When the Dutch designer joined Paris Fashion Week in 2023, his oddly formed clothes found an instant audience in stylists with an eye for the strange. Before long he was influencing designers up and down the price and experience spectrums. The nude latex tops on his runway last season—the man’s worn by a woman, and the woman’s worn by a man—caused an online sensation. A month later he had the Gaultier job, but those latex tops were only a warm-up act for the hirsute bodysuits, one with full-frontal male nudity, he showed today. Afterwards, an editor with a case of the vapors could be heard wondering aloud, “What was that?”

Gaultier, as anybody who knows anything about fashion could tell you, was the industry’s original enfant terrible, so named for putting men in skirts in the late 1980s. Over the decades, though the nickname stuck, he became part of the Paris establishment, launching perfumes, designing tour costumes for Madonna, introducing a Junior diffusion line, and joining the haute couture calendar. He retired from couture in 2020, having wound down his ready-to-wear business years before that. After five years of guest-designed couture collections by Haider Ackermann and Glenn Martens, among others, the label’s parent company Puig changed course and established a permanent creative director role at the label.

Lantink’s first piece from Gaultier came at 12 when he received a beanie with devil horns as a present and “couldn’t stop wearing it.” A few years later, on his first day at a conservative high school, he wore a JPG mesh shirt with Ganesh on it, and, as he said, his nipples out. “I have loads of memories of having a Jean Paul Gautlier item and having a feeling that you stand for something, or that you can create your own identity,” he said. “It’s so important to have a clothing piece that makes you feel empowered somehow. He did that for me.”

Lantink’s instinct was to target the youth vote: making clubwear and streetwear that treated Gaultier icons like the cone bra, the marinière stripe, and the tatouage mesh tattoo shirts, as well as the Gaultier Junior logo, with an irreverence that the house founder would recognize and appreciate. Lantink used wire to create fresh versions of his own signature 3-D shapes, including a striped minidress with a front-and-back S-curve, and dreamed up a new kind of pants that’s just two strips of fabric stretched taut from a belt at the waist to the ankles, more bare than covered, and for that reason, ideal for a sweaty rave. “I work very intuitively,” said Lantink. “I’m really trying to catch an energy.” And if it disturbs the grown-ups? Well, yes, exactly—that’s the idea.