The comeback of the Jean Paul Gaultier RTW suggests that if you can’t be interesting, be exposed

If Duran Lantink was using Jean Paul Gaultier’s resuscitated ready-to-wear collection to draw attention to himself, he succeeded. He has shown that the market for the vile and vulgar is so huge that crassness deserved a turn on the runway. By now, the controversy it has caused is well ignited across social media. Mr Lantink offered the kind of clothes that confuse: do you want to be dressed or undressed, or to be dressed to look undressed. There was what appeared to be a union suit with a full-body hyper-realistic photo print of a totally naked hirsute man, complete with genitalia (we were advised not to share the photo, for legal reasons). For a debut, Mr Lantink certainly chose the low-hanging fruit of provocation to achieve instant fame. It is hard to determine if this is a genuine homage to JPG’s transgressive spirit or a convenient shortcut for instant digital oxygen.

While showing loads of skin was expected, it was the embrace of maximum exposure ensembles that defined the collection. Mr Lantink’s recent history suggested that fabric would, once again, be used to suggest it is optional. At his own Fall/Winter 2025 collection, titled Duranimal, the show opened with a female model wearing a highly-sculpted prosthetic male torso (with abs). It then closed with a male model in a top that was essentially large, jiggling prosthetic female breasts—a show-and-tell that made the news globally. That kind of in-your-face provocation had, in fact, struck earlier. Back in 2018, he designed trousers for the Janelle Monáe music video for Pynk with in-seams that look like the female sexual organs so that when the singer and her dancers pranced they show pudendal dilation. That he is focused on highly-sexualized, and literal body-centric fashion is perhaps grossly understating it.

This fixation on unfiltered anatomia reveals a fundamental commercial myopia. Western liberal shock is not a monolithic, globally accepted phenomenon. These designs are fundamentally unviable in vast swathes of the global luxury market, especially here in Asia, a region defined by its reverence for public decorum. Its consumers are the bedrock of the sales of European luxury fashion. One SOTD just texted us to say that the collection was “sia suay (泻衰, disgraceful in Hokkien). So who was Mr Lantink targeting? Surely not the Americans whose president would likely consider such as the failings of the “radical left lunatics”. Some observers say that he was not selling the clothes, but the message. Which was? To trade a nuanced conversation about environmentalism and upcycling—the true moral anchor of his brand—for the spectacle of cheap bodily offence? The core purpose of the Gautier RTW collection was neither commerce nor high art, but merely the self-serving pursuit of notoriety. Provocation is, regrettably, often just performance art for people who run out of talking points.

In the Gaultier collection, Mr. Lantink’s unclad aesthetic pitch was carried through, even when the ensembles avoided full-frontal nudity. Still, they would require the wearer to go through, at the minimum, the Brazilian, even the Boyzilian. Such is the likely caveat for bodysuits with leg openings that ride up to the natural waist, swimwear with similar minimalistic style, or evening dress with waistline that went past the hips, hanging onto the placket for dear life. There is, naturally, reinterpretations of Gautier ‘codes’. The conical bra that Madonna made famous was now a small topeda, splayed like amputated limps. There were ‘nude’ stretch-knits that were printed in tikki-like motifs, rather than typical tattoo graphics. No Gautier collection can be missing the horizontal Breton stripes, so they were included, but now they shot even a hint of nautical heritage to smithereens. Conversely, Duran Lantink’s debut was not missing controversy—the fastest way for a designer to achieve a very specific type of cultural power: temporary.

Screen shot (top): jeanpaulgaultier/YouTube. Photos: Jean Paul Gaultier