Photo by Abel Minnée via @duranlantinkyo.
The luxury fashion industry has a sustainability problem. When it came out last July that Burberry destroyed $36.8 million worth of merchandise to preserve its exclusive reputation, the world was horrified, but it quickly came out that they were far from the only ones burning and shredding clothing they couldn’t sell at a certain price point—commonly referred to as dead stock. With the watchful eye of environmentalism on fashion brands—ready to cancel anyone who trashes usable garments—dead stock can be a big problem, but for Duran Lantink, the 2019 LVMH prize finalist who pieces together found fabrics to create his collections, it’s his playground.
“It’s like being in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory,” the Dutch designer says, combing through racks of his compilation masterpieces that combine streetwear knits with elegant silks and fuse legs of denim with legs of leather, meeting in the middle. “I just have to remind myself not to be too greedy, because if I am going to make a sustainable collection I have to be able to use what I take.”
While luxury fashion boutique Browns, who opened a pop up store in Berlin last week, a gave the creator carte blanche to take what he wanted from their designer-filled warehouse, Lantink stops himself from revealing the original authors of the different components in his collection. “I’ve met a few designers who are actually very happy about the fact that I am reusing the stock that didn’t get sold, but there are other designers of course that don’t really like it,” he says. Naturally, we’d be curious as to whether the creators in questions have as much of a problem with clothing destruction as having someone breath new life into them.
Photo by Abel Minnée via @duranlantinkyo.
Many of the original labels are removed from the patchwork garments, but Lantink does not replace the names with his own, favouring instead to leave little fingerprints behind in the new designs. One way to catch his work is to look at the colour of the thread. “Whenever there is something broken we do embroideries in orange,” he reveals.
Lantink may work with a lot of luxury pieces, but he’s no snob. Last September, at Amsterdam Fashion Week, he sent down a model down the runway covered in literal McDonald’s trash. His eyes light up when explaining the low-end of his high-low tastes. “The nicest thing is to combine trash with luxury,” Lantink says. “The nice thing about luxury is when you open it up, it has lining and the materials are so nice. You see so much love in how it was made. The good thing about working with trash is you can just go like a machine and you don’t have to take care of it. You can just get scissors and cut it apart. It is a different type of energetic way of working.”
Sustainability isn’t the only place where the Dutch designer gets political—one of his more famous pieces are the vagina pants commissioned by Janelle Monáe in her PYNK video (2018). “They originally asked me to make a dress, but I said no,” he says. “I wanted to do vagina pants, because it makes more sense in the times we are living in.” Lantink insists that you don’t have to be a woman to support women, crediting strong relationships with his mother and grandmother for his delight in thwarting the patriarchy.
“You can look at fashion as a super booming business, but on the other hand the ideology of fashion it is about what is going on today and what is important now,” he says. “I am not in a position to say that people should do, but for me, fashion is always political.”