Designer Duran Lantink has been quietly championing sustainability with his label for some time now, using deadstock to create highly covetable, one-off pieces.
And he’s been using his next-level mash-up fashion to support LGBTQ+ rights in South Africa, too.
Duran Lantink started the new decade in a rush. Speaking to Mission over the phone from his Amsterdam studio earlier this year, the Dutch designer, who has made a name for himself from recycling and reconstructing fashion’s castoffs, had several deadlines looming. There was a project for the British style magazine Dazed & Confused, a collection made from denim brand Lee’s deadstock for the Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, for which he’s a designer-in-residence, and an exhibition involving cutting up a Saudi princess’s couture wardrobe.
But what he was most excited about is the funding he’s got to host a fashion show in South Africa with SistaazHood, a 40-strong community of homeless transgender sex workers living in Cape Town. He’s been collaborating with the Sistaaz since 2015, after a random googling session with his photographer friend Jan Hoek. They were looking for a project to work on together when they discovered a photo of two beautiful girls dressed in a fabulous mash-up of styles. After scraping together some money, Lantink and Hoek traveled to South Africa to find them. “Everyone told us that it was dangerous to go out looking for sex workers on our own, but we had a shot of tequila and went off with our backpacks at 1am. We were quite naive,” says Lantink. That first night, they found one of the girls living under a bridge and, through her, discovered Sex Workers Education & Advocacy Taskforce (S.W.E.A.T.), an activist community campaigning for healthcare and housing for sex workers in South Africa. It took a while to earn the girls’ trust—“They’ve been mistreated so many times,” Lantink explains.
Since that initial meeting, Lantink and Hoek have been back several times and built a bond with them through their anarchic approach to fashion. “They use similar techniques to me. They make outfits out of things they find on the street,” Lantink says. So far, they’ve created two collections together: one from foraged clothes and the other, Dream (based on the girls’ fantasy lives), formed Lantink’s show for Amsterdam Fashion Week FW16. Last year, they crowdfunded a glossy title called Sistaaz of the Castle, which documents the girls’ lives and raises global awareness around LGBTQ+ rights in South Africa. Lantink says this isn’t about him and Hoek providing a platform: It works both ways. And they share the profits, as well as pay the Sistaaz modeling fees.
From the start of his career, Lantink has valued collaborations. Back in 2016, as an MA student on the environmental Fashion Matters program at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, he would go into boutiques and cheekily ask for sale items for free. He would be called mad, until he explained that he’d make new, unique items from the stock that would be worth more. The four shops that took—and successfully sold—his designer mash-ups didn’t regret it. Now designers give him deadstock and his label sells at the London concept store Browns. He’s most famous for the “vagina pants” Janelle Monáe wore in her video for “PYNK”, but he doesn’t want to talk about that anymore. He’d rather tell us about his next project, a circular initiative with teen superstar Billie Eilish, whose stylist has given him old stock from shoots, from which he’s creating a new collection for her to wear. It’s the type of sustainable idea that he could replicate across the industry. But despite this increasingly high-profile work, he’s still living in a squat with no heating.
Misfits and outcasts are a common theme in Lantink’s work and life. He’s always felt disconnected from the mainstream: “At school, I would fight for the people who got picked on. I would defend them because I have a strong voice.” And he didn’t try to fit in himself. Aged six, he would go to school wearing a long skirt. “I dyed my hair pink, pierced my nose. I was an extreme kid,” he says with a laugh. At 12 he started to rummage through his mother’s wardrobe. He would cut up her clothes and then attach them together with safety pins. And he’d pick the best—the Jean Paul Gaultier, the Margiela’s. “She hated it, but it was for a good cause in the end,” he says. “Some of it ended up in my degree show.”
“You’ve got a lot of stock and, within that, you’re trying to work out what fits well and what doesn’t”
While growing up in The Hague, he hung out with a crowd that was into electronic music and spent a lot of time at house and techno parties. “Nightlife is inspiring because it’s disconnected from daily life,” he says. But more than that, the music he was listening to became better when it was mixed. Lantink is like a DJ with his designer deadstock, combining wonderful things to create something more awesome. “You’ve got a lot of stock and, within that, you’re trying to work out what fits well and what doesn’t,” he says. “You don’t have the luxury of thinking about who you’re designing for. You’re busy trying to use everything. It’s fun because it’s challenging.”
“Fashion has to become sustainable, because that’s how we need to live for the planet.”
Many of the big fashion players have been quiet about Lantink’s work, confused about how to react to this new type of brand, one that rips up their old stock and mixes it with other designers’ pieces, then stitches the labels together with orange embroidery thread to mark it as its own creation. “Basically, I’m cleaning up their shit. It would be very bad publicity for them if they said I can’t cut up the things that they can’t sell because they produce too many pieces,” he says. “I think I’m doing a good thing. I don’t mean to offend any of the brands. I want to show that it’s a pity that such good quality isn’t being used.”
So, is he optimistic about the future? “Fashion has become a huge industry, rather than something creative, which is why it’s not working anymore,” he says. “Fashion has to become sustainable, because that’s how we need to live for the planet.”
He’s concerned that some big brands see sustainability as just another trend. They pay lip service to recycling by flashing it over some of their lines, he says, but don’t embed it in the business as a whole. In his own work, he plans to keep on innovating, go beyond recycling, and explore sustainable materials. He’s interested in working in the digital sphere, too. “I’m not the answer to the fashion industry’s problems,” he says, “but what I’m doing is trying to fix it in a minor way.” And for Lantink, that means looking beyond the mainstream and finding beauty in the shadows.
This feature was taken from Mission’s fourth issue. All images courtesy of Abel Minnee.
