You know that moment when something repels you, but you can’t look away? That’s where Duran Lantink found himself the first time he saw snake print. “Oh, that’s terrible,” he thought. And then, of course: “But I kind of love it.” That paradox—the magnetic pull of revulsion—became the writhing, scaly heart of his Fall 2025 collection, a maximalist collision of animal instinct, upcycled chaos, and the kind of brain-melting performance art that makes fashion week worth the migraines.
Lantink has never been one for convention, so this season, he decided to quite literally invade an office. The show unfolded at Bureau Betak’s new headquarters (huge flex), the production powerhouse behind Dior, Saint Laurent, and fashion’s most legendary spectacles, where models slinked through workstations occupied by real employees. “We had this idea of really, sort of, intruding on their space,” Lantink explained. If fashion is a job, Lantink made it clear: This is work worth disrupting. As if that wasn’t disorienting enough, an 18-person opera ensemble performed “Paragraph 7,” a haunting piece in which they all sang 18 different songs at once. “Not sure if you still want to come, though,” Lantink joked as he was telling me thing before the show. “It sounds chaotic, but weirdly enough, it’s quite meditative.”
Gone was last season’s restraint. Fall 2025 was a full-throttle commitment to excess. Prints exploded in their wildest, most clashing extremes—python, leopard, tartan, and camo colliding in a visual cacophony. “Last season, we were quite sharp with form and color—this time, we wanted to go a bit more wild,” Lantink said. Shapes sharpened into squares, but textures ran wild—deadstock pony-hair, remixed camo tees, and hand-knitted tartan (crafted by a collective of older Dutch female artisans who, in Lantink’s words, are “radical knit nerds”). If last season’s woman was streamlined, this season’s looked like an aristocratic English lady on acid—one who, on a whim, threw on snake-print leggings just to see what happens.
So, what happened? A transformation, an unraveling of identity. “It’s about challenging yourself with something you maybe don’t like and finding the beauty in it,” Lantink mused. His process is anything but formulaic. “We don’t do moodboards—it’s more about a dialogue with the stylist, the art director, the sound director. Conversations that slowly build into something cohesive.”
During the show, screaming opera—predictably jarring—blasted through the speakers, setting the tone for a spectacle that blurred the lines between human and animal. Mica Argañaraz opened in a sculpted prosthetic man’s chest, complete with chiseled six-pack, her baggy pants slung daringly low. The collection unfolded like an evolutionary fever dream: prints multiplied, textures thickened, silhouettes went feral. One moment, varsity jackets and toggle coats; the next, Leon Dame stomping out in zebra body paint, matching thong, and thigh-high boots, as if he’d just escaped from a deranged fashion safari.
Then came the finale—Chandler Frye in a prosthetic top with bouncing, cartoonishly oversized breasts. Some editors scoffed. But after speaking with Lantink, the moment felt oddly poetic. Gender, form, identity—it was all up for grabs. What started as a satire of hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity ended as something strangely beautiful, proving that in Lantink’s world, transformation is always the point.
At its core, the show was controlled mayhem—a meticulously planned spectacle that felt reckless in the best way. “It’s about escapism,” Lantink said. “Transcending into a different space where you can forget something and just be inspired by the sound and atmosphere.”
Of course, his signature—upcycling, hybridization, deconstruction—was there. But this time, the process felt looser, more instinctual. “It’s always a mix,” Lantink said. “We started with round shapes, but now we’re leaning into sharper, more structured forms.” There was humor, too—Lantink named the collection Dur-Animal, a nod to the endless high school nicknames he’s accrued (last season was Duran-Ski, and yes, he’s considering Durex next). “It’s a bit of a joke, obviously,” he laughed. “But then it turned out the collection actually is quite animal print-based.”
“I think [the message] is pretty clear,” he teased. “But I’d rather see what people take from it.”
Now, if you’ll excuse him, he has some binge-watching to do. “I’ve been waiting to watch White Lotus season 3, but I don’t have time right now,” he said. “So after the show, I’m going to binge-watch and sleep. And then wake up and start working again.”
