I can almost hear Julie Andrews taking her cue to sing in The Sound of Music as the bells chime for Jean Paul Gaultier Spring/Summer 2027. A year after taking the reins at JPG, Duran Lantink arrives at his most accomplished collection yet. Here, the story unfolds through the poetics of sound: bell-adorned clothes create an unconventional monastery of (un)godly shapes.
Taking over a fashion house is no easy task. Regardless of proficiency, there’s an omnipresent tension between the maison’s codes and a creative director’s voice. Lantink is known for his use of humour in design. Examples include the proposition of a man wearing a bodysuit printed with a woman’s naked body, and vice versa. But what should we make of a joke that has to be spelled out to be comedic?
This season, rather than explicitly stating it, Lantink is instead interested in conducting an exploration of form and shape. The show opens with a strong, padded-shoulder coat in full white. There’s a tone of innocence that speaks to the designer’s proclivity towards circular softness, even when working with sharp edges. Gaultier’s famous cone bra is reimagined with a softer touch.
The slightly misplaced remains central to the designer’s vocabulary: an off-centre button on a pair of jeans, a ruffled top sitting strangely against the body, or a familiar garment pushed into an unfamiliar proportion. Flowing white dresses conjure images of monastic modernity; one imagines these billowing garments to belong to women taking vows in the morning, only to break them before lunchtime.
The collection moves between sci-fi and religious imagery. Reverent-mother-inspired headpieces, padded trenches and collaged fabrics transform everyday garments—bras, jackets, shirts—into something less recognisable. Gaultier’s women seem to have wandered into Dune or The Fifth Element, while the provincial styling makes it difficult not to imagine Andrews singing her heart out for a better future. These are clothes that turn heads and make the viewer ask: “Did I see that right?”
Bells embed themselves in the image Lantink projects, clothes announcing themselves before they’re seen. Their sound becomes extensions of the garments’ movement, producing a rhythm as the models walk. The body is now an instrument.
There is something both ecclesiastical and incredibly queer about this procession. The bell refuses to enter a room quietly; it doesn’t politely ask for attention. Lantink’s humour finds its rhythm. Rather than relying on the instantaneous recognition of a visual joke, the clothes unfold over time. What initially appears absurd begins to make its own kind of sense. The collection’s strangeness becomes less a punchline than a proposition. If Lantink’s earlier collections sometimes treated humour as an answer in itself, Spring/Summer 2027 allows it to become a way of moving through Gaultier’s archive without becoming imprisoned by it. The collection does not resolve its contradictions so much as make them wearable: innocence and obscenity, discipline and disorder, devotion and irreverence.
Fredric Jameson once said, “I quite dislike method—or distrust it, let’s say.” Perhaps this is the most appropriate position from which to approach a collection that seems to resist settling into one. There is something suspicious about the desire to make every look mean something, to locate the joke, identify the reference, historicise the silhouette and finally arrive at the answer. Fashion does not always want to be solved. Sometimes it wants to make a noise. Sometimes it wants to ring a bell, walk into the room dressed like an alien nun and refuse to explain itself. The hills are not only alive, they have eyes.
Words by Mehmet Süzgün
