Starring Alex Consani and Leon Dame, Duran Lantink’s provocative Autumn/Winter 2025 campaign unfolds at the zoo
Since Duran Lantink’s voluptuous breasts bounded through Paris Fashion Week in March – OK, not his own, but a bouncing latex breastplate strapped to the obliging torso of male model Chandler Frye – the Dutch designer has been recast as fashion’s latest enfant terrible. In an industry forever eager to ordain a new provocateur, Lantink has since been duly installed as heir to the enfant terrible emeritus himself, Jean Paul Gaultier.
That coronation has, for the moment, put his eponymous label on pause. In its place arrives what may be either a swan song or an intermission: an Autumn/Winter 2025 campaign, Duranimals, shot by Juergen Teller and starring Alex Consani and Leon Dame.
“I love that my pieces are being put into magazines, but I don’t believe that that’s where it ends. It needs to take that step further and it needs to go into the world,” Lantink told AnOther previously. The new campaign does so, appropriately, at the zoo.
If his first two Paris Fashion Week shows flirted with restraint (a nod to the solemnities of a French audience), Autumn/Winter 2025 abandons the pretence. Here, excess is the point: python and leopard prints spar with tartan and camouflage; plastic breasts and moulded abs jut from latex torsos; trousers come with the backside excised; his signature globular forms swell menacingly at the shoulders.
In the campaign, Leon Dame reprises his zebra ensemble – body paint, thong, thigh-high boots – as though the creature has at last slipped the bars of its cage. Meanwhile, the omnipresent and uber-fashionable Alex Consani coils herself into skintight python, all scales and aquatic languor. It’s an irreverent safari staged for fashion’s benefit.
But for Lantink, provocation for provocation’s sake isn’t really the end goal. The latex breasts, zebra thongs and backside-baring trousers are all gestures towards a commitment to reshaping what clothing can mean in the everyday. “It’s trying to find a new way of dressing. I would love to see a regular person in a bubble top going to the supermarket,” he insisted previously, a refrain he’s been repeating since those early Paris outings.
That pursuit has taken him from slicing up Barbies’ dresses as a child to slicing up Margiela and Loewe for the runway, transforming discarded garments into globular silhouettes and padded absurdities. Circularity remains his DNA, though his upcycling now reads less like a sustainability sermon than an aesthetic of mischief, turning excess into romance, collage into commentary.
Whether Duranimals marks a swan song or a pause, the campaign underscores his peculiar talent to make the ridiculous feel sincere. Like Gaultier before him, Lantink seems to understand that the enfant terrible is most dangerous when he is also a little bit sentimental.
