Duran Lantink's Gaultier Wants to Be Seen From Three-Quarters: Jutting Blazers, Bell-Stitched Denim and Dutch Checks

Duran Lantink showed his fourth ready-to-wear collection for Jean Paul Gaultier on Sunday night, October 4, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, under the title Multidimensionality. The brief, as WWD reports it, was to be looked at from every side. The show space was lined with mirrors so guests could read each garment's construction as it walked past.

That idea drove the tailoring. WWD describes hourglass blazers that look conventional head-on and jut out in profile, and collars pushed forward and away from the neck. Lantink told WWD he prefers the three-quarter view of a garment to the front or the side, which is why the show was staged to give it to everyone. Several jackets carry a porthole opening cut at the chest, with cone-bra shapes underneath, and the first look in the house's lookbook, a white coat with rounded shoulders and a raised collar, shows the approach in one piece.

The references are Dutch and Alpine rather than Parisian. Designscene lists Dutch checks, tartans and florals with their graphic character kept and their colours sharpened, a recurring square neckline on mackintoshes and bombers, and a blazer whose lapel is folded four times. WWD adds Lanz of Salzburg florals, kilt and Western references, and "Junior Gaultier" T-shirts as the alternative to the cone bra.

Jean Paul Gaultier

The details are where the house's humour survives. Designscene reports bells embroidered onto jeans, skirts and coats that sound as the wearer moves, a perforated leather dress that hangs from the head and swings like hair, and sandals shaped from the negative space of a flip-flop or a tabi shoe. It also lists utilitarian trench coats, field jackets and cargo trousers as the base of the wardrobe.

Jean Paul Gaultier

The verdict from WWD is the useful counterweight. It calls the collection Lantink's best-constructed yet, but says it skewed too serious in its pursuit of the experimental, "cold rather than cool", and short of the hedonism and joy associated with the house's founder. Designscene reports Lantink's own position as this: people need different clothes for different moments, because nobody exists as a single fixed version of themselves.

For the house it is a test of whether a design language built on construction can carry a label best known for provocation. Neither the lookbook nor the reviews we read give prices or on-sale dates; the 44-look lineup is on Gaultier's own lookbook page.