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Fresh off his Andam Prize win earlier this year, Duran Lantink made his official Paris Fashion Week debut today after spinning a luxury upcycling business — a collector’s dream — into a ready-to-wear line with mass appeal.
After his prize win, Lantink secured €100,000 in funding and mentorship from Chloé CEO Riccardo Bellini, starting in October. He was also approached to join the Paris schedule by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (FHCM) and decided to go for it.
“I feel like I’m in a new phase,” Lantink said over coffee in Paris, a few days before the show. “I used to think the traditional system wasn’t for me. But now, I feel confident that I want to enter the rat race, try producing my clothes and see what that would be like.”
DThe Dutch designer founded his eponymous label in 2016, following his fine art and fashion design studies at Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Sandberg Instituut. It was made solely of upcycled pieces, including a jacket made from Frankensteined Givenchy and Louis Vuitton coats, sourced from vintage markets. In 2019, he was an LVMH Prize finalist, and presented an upcycled Vuitton x Gucci bag to Bernard Arnault. He’s worked with retailers and brands to create upcycled pieces with their unsold inventory, and his website carries one-of-a-kind hybrid luxury items that often sell to museums or collectors. He’s shown off-schedule in Paris and worked on fashion month collabs. Revenues are in the low six figures.
For Duran, this is new terrain. Having never sold via wholesale or produced with suppliers before, Lantink knows he has a lot to learn in order to meet his goal to build an international fashion brand with global stockists. And, while he’s in contact with a sales agency and a supplier, he’s not ready to take big orders this season. “That’s something I want to focus on next season — it’s not something you do overnight.”
The Andam jury saw inventive and completely new silhouettes backed up by ethical manufacturing using discarded luxury garments and deadstock, says the prize’s founder Nathalie Dufour, who believes Lantink is in a strong position to build a brand. “Duran has already built a strong platform with the collaboration of the luxury industry, to help reduce waste,” she says. “He has the right positioning and talent to succeed.”
Like many young designers without regular stockists, Lantink is funding his show and collections almost entirely with sponsorship money. The Spring/Summer 2024 show, taking place on Tuesday afternoon, is sponsored by Mac Cosmetics and L’Oréal, with support from the FHCM.
“The sponsorship is so important. I couldn’t show without it,” he says. “Before, I was making money out of creating collections, I was paid to make them [by the retailers and brands]. Now, it’s investing money in a collection and a show instead, which is a little bit scary.”
Alongside more wearable separates and outerwear, the SS24 collection will feature new iterations of the bulbous, curved silhouettes that Lantink showed off-schedule last season. Created from moulded fabric stuffed with fibre filler, they’ve been featured in magazine shoots from Le Monde’s M magazine to Vogue, worn by celebrities including Hailey Bieber. But they’re not necessarily wearable to the average consumer and, being handmade, they’d be “tricky” to produce at scale, Lantink says. So, this season, he’s experimenting with tailoring and new fabrics alongside the showpieces, to demonstrate to buyers that the vision can translate to wearable clothes.
“This time, rather than combining a trench coat with a bomber jacket or something like that, I’m studying [used] garments and thinking about how to make them my own identity,” he says. “That goes hand in hand with thinking more in a commercial way.” The collection is all recycled except for one skirt, he says, and Andam helped to secure deadstock from a major luxury label for Lantink to use on some looks.
Lantink is wary of wholesale. Last season, one e-tailer tried to place an order but wanted to cut out Lantink’s sales agent and decide on its own pricing structure. “I want to believe buyers are supporting an emerging brand, but it’s important to find the right partners,” he says.
Before Brexit made it extremely challenging to run a brand from the UK, he planned to move from Amsterdam to London to launch his label. Looking ahead, the plan is potentially to move his business to Paris full time instead (he already rents an apartment here for when he visits). He hopes the move will open up access to support year round from FHCM and other companies. “I’m trying to finance everything myself and it’s pretty hardcore. In Paris, people take fashion seriously,” he says. “There’s more mentorship and financial support available for fashion brands than in Amsterdam.”
Encouraged by initiatives like Gucci Vault and Dolce & Gabbana’s new support of names like Karoline Vitto, Lantink is hoping that more major labels will support rising talents like him in the future.
“I think creative talent at this point is so needed because everything is so business at the big houses,” he says. “Some of the shows from the bigger houses are not that much about creativity anymore. They need to realise that creativity is the thing that keeps it going. It would be really sad if us young talents can’t afford to keep going.”
And, with rising costs of everything from show production to shipping, he fears sponsorship and major label support is the only way younger design generations will be able to pursue launching a brand. “I’m seeing prices and I’m like, how? Sometimes, I think, ‘maybe I should do next season in a different way’ or something. But that hype, the high after your show, it just makes you want to do it one more time.”
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