“What does couture mean for me?” pondered designer Duran Lantink. “I started thinking about Louis IV and Marie Antoinette and trying to mix it with futurism.” Lantink’s first couture collection for Jean Paul Gaultier wasn’t presented in the lookbook form you see here, but in the infernal heat of the house’s runway venue. As the audience was frantically fanning itself, anyone’s ability to follow logic and storytelling was in meltdown. Perhaps an apt mental state in which to surrender to the upside-down, sideways-on spectacle the designer had in store for us.
Lantink is a member of the new generation who is puzzling out how to merge old-world Parisian couture techniques with the possibilities of new structures and technologies. It’s an experimental place where the body and traditional forms of clothing obey no rules. For one thing, he’d 3-D scanned the torso of the top male model, Leon Dame, and provided him with a new internally corseted, melted sideways body carapace.
Displaced corsetry was a thing. Satin or feather-covered tubes gushed torrents of tulle, fore and aft. Clothes seemed to have been put on in non-sensical order, a tailored jacket worn as a hood; a cropped top becoming a sort of halter. Elaborate Versailles brocade covered a shape that perhaps recalled a substantial drain tube.
These looks took so much attention that other garments more clearly from Gaultier’s oeuvre could have been missed. But there they were: homages to the jean jacket, the bomber, and the argyle sweater, as well as a beautiful mille-feuille coat and dress, plus a pink micro-pleated dress. Gaultier’s clients have always been adventurous people. It’ll be intriguing to see how far they’ll go with the new princeling at court.
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