Paris Fashion Week. Naked men (almost) on the runway. Jean Paul Gaultier is back with a new provocation

Paris Fashion Week is buzzing again. The new creative director Jean Paul Gaultier, a Dutch designer Duran Lantink, staged a full-blown striptease on the runway—the models walked out in outfits that mimicked the naked male body. With all the details. Yes, literally with by everyone.

Expectations for the brand's return were high, notes The New York Times.

People awaited the brand's return like they did a Madonna concert in the '90s: with excitement and nostalgia. And for good reason. Jean-Paul Gaultier himself is the man who turned fashion into a spectacle and made gender a fashion topic long before the TikTok debates. He dressed Madonna in the iconic bullet bra, sent men in skirts down the runway, and generally believed that fashion isn’t about propriety, but about freedom.

After Gauthier left in 2020, the fashion house brought in temporary designers. But now there’s a permanent creative director at the helm. And Lantink seems to have decided not just to pay homage to the master’s legacy, but to throw a party at his expense.

Collection: Nudity, Rave, and a Touch of the '80s

Lantink called his first show Junior — in honor of Gaultier’s 1988 youth line. That year, incidentally, was the designer’s own birth year, notes The Business of Fashion. Fate, coincidence—or just a nice press release story.

Lantink grew up among Amsterdam’s clubbing scene, and it shows: the runway looked more like a rave at RoXY than a classic haute couture fashion show. The models wore bodysuits featuring hyper-realistic prints of a naked male body. In some places, they were even too realistic.

It only got better from there. Remixes of Gautier’s iconic designs took the stage: cone-shaped bras, deliberately voluminous shoulders, and suits that looked like slashed wetsuits. There wasn’t much clothing in the traditional sense—but there were plenty of bodies, latex, and boldness to last the entire season.

“It’s just a game”

Before the Lantink screening admitted...that he didn't consult the archives—he decided to work “from memory.” His goal is not a reconstruction, but “playing with the brand's image.”

“There’s no need to look for meaning behind every twist and turn,” he said after the show. “The main thing is that it’s fun. After all, Gaultier is always about nudity, sexuality, and provocation.”

In response, The New York Times noted that provocation for provocation's sake sounds rather adolescent.

And the columnist Vogue José Criales-Unsueta, on the other hand, saw the collection as a “bold and daring exploration of gender.”

One thing is clear: Jean Paul Gaultier is once again the talk of the town. And that seems to be exactly what Lantink was aiming for.