Inside Duran Lantink’s Surreal, Sustainable, and Seriously Fun World of Fashion

“Duran used to say to me, ‘If I see a flat roll of fabric, I freak out because I don’t know what to do with it!’ ” recalls the designer Kym Ellery, sitting in the audience at her friend Duran Lantink’s spring 2024 show, in Paris. Evidence is growing that he has figured it out. It was only the second runway presentation for the Dutch designer, and his first on the official calendar, but Lantink has already made a name for himself as a champion of upcycling, creating eye-popping statements from existing garments and discarded fabrics. Ellery and Lantink first met during the pandemic, when she gave him carte blanche to reconfigure items from the archives of her brand, Ellery. “Duran vibrates in a different way than most,” she says. “More than ever, we need people in fashion whose intention is purely creative.”

In his case, that means a fascinating combination of the sublime, the amusing, and the down-to-earth. Consider, for instance, a pair of Y-front briefs inflated to Mickey Mouse proportions; a diaphanous gauze nightgown with a delicate breastplate made from a vintage Dutch lace cap; vintage jeans patchworked with deadstock Speedos and leg warmers; and a bubble-shaped denim jacket and miniskirt combo that looks as if Violet Beauregarde ditched her tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory for an afternoon at the mall. The clothes are gender-neutral, which might not even be worth mentioning when most of them are so sculptural that they’re not quite human in form. Some items do fit closer to the body, including a fabulous pair of drop-waist pants topped with a stretchy beige corsetlike insert that can accommodate a variety of frames.

Perhaps a touch of folly is to be expected from the guy who gave us the famous vagina pants from Janelle Monáe’s 2018 “Pynk” video and the gleaming trenchcoat Beyoncé wore in a recent Tiffany & Co. campaign, made from bolts of gold-toned PVC that was destined for the dumpster because of tiny surface flaws. (Lantink’s commitment to deadstock and recycled fabrics is absolute; most recently, it earned him the runner-up 2023 ANDAM Special Prize for sustainability.) It was the stylist Patti Wilson who helped bring Lantink to Beyoncé’s attention, after Wilson volunteered to help Lantink with his first collection, in 2020. She taught him how to group his designs and present them as a story, and emphasized how important hair and makeup are to getting his point across.

Lantink got his bachelor’s in fashion from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, in Amsterdam, in 2013, and his master’s at the adjacent Sandberg Instituut in 2017. Soon after, he started approaching stores such as Browns, in London, and asking them to let him recut their unsold designer back stock. But his fixation with recycling started well before sustainable design became a buzzy concept. He grew up in The Hague, the only child of a single mother who went to raves and had a lot of drag queen friends. Starting at age 8, Lantink would raid her closet and slash her Jean Paul Gaultier and W&LT outfits to create new looks for his tiny self, using safety pins and tape. “I got my butt kicked for it, but it was clearly an obsession,” he recalls. Eventually, his mother and aunt relented and started giving him their hand-me-downs.

More recently, Lantink has made art and fashion installations in collaboration with refugees, and had a six-month residency at the Museum van de Geest, an Amsterdam and Haarlem-based institution focused on art and neurodiversity, where he produced clothing and a mixed-media installation with the help of people with Down syndrome and autism. For the past six years, Lantink and one of his closest friends, the photographer Jan Hoek, have gone back and forth to Cape Town, South Africa, 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). Together they have put together a magazine, designed new pieces out of found clothing, staged a runway show, and documented the process in a film called Sistaaz of the Castle, which will be out in November.

The project started in Amsterdam over a drink. “Jan and I were on Google,” Lantink recalls, “and we saw two girls, and they just looked amazing.” They were Coco and Lolly, trans women in Cape Town whose flamboyant DIY style had sharp fashion references. Lantink and Hoek threw on their backpacks and got on a plane. “We knew the street they were working on, so we went down at midnight. Coco was like, ‘Oh my god, did you travel the world for me?’ ” An agreement was struck so that the participants and SWEAT would split any proceeds equally with Lantink and Hoek, and the first workshop began. The idea was for the women to share dream incarnations or fantasies, accompanied by essays and outfits. One wanted to be in charge of a high-class brothel and wear Vivienne Westwood all day; another imagined herself as ­Victoria Beckham running a drug ring in Miami.

Lantink’s website displays the same kind of creative thinking. On it, customers have the option to create their own page, where they can resell their one-off garments with Lantink’s blessing. They can also opt for an alteration arrangement, for a fee, if they want to transform their pieces into something new. To seal the deal, Lantink sends a contract smudged with a drop of his own blood. “When NFTs were really big, people started to say, ‘Duran, you need to do an NFT,’ ” he says. “I was like, ‘Fuck no, but if I do my blood with my fingerprint, that’s non-fungible.’ ”

Lantink is still enjoying his status as the new kid on the fashion block, even though there are growing pains associated with becoming a real business—the process of finding sponsors for his shows, for example, can be daunting. “At this point, people are still nice,” he says of the goodwill and advice he’s received. “So it’s fun. It’s always been really important for me to play like a child and see what comes out of it.”

Hair by Stéphane Lancien for L’Oréal Paris at Calliste Agency; makeup by Hannah Murray for Bobbi Brown at Streeters; manicure by Béatrice Eni for Manucurist and Byredo at ASG Paris. Models: Leon Dame at Viva London Management, Elise Kouzou at Ford Models Paris; casting by Samuel E. Scheiman at DM Casting; assistant casting: Evagria Sergeeva at DM Casting; produced by Morgane Millot at Mini Title; photo assistants: Clement Dauvent, Adrien Turlais; digital technician: Marion Duchaussoy; fashion assistant: Emilie Carlash; production assistant: Ambre Silvestre; hair assistant: Julian Sapin; makeup assistant: Joana Lafourcade.