Duran Lantink’s Ensemble with vagina mask is one of the works from the Centraal Museum collection, in dialogue with the artists from the Modern Love festival exhibition.

Fashion is ephemeral – that is implicit in the term itself: something is in or out of fashion. But why we wear what we wear remains a fundamental question. Clothes protect the body from the weather, and they hide us from or reveal us to the gaze of others. Duran Lantink assembles his outfits from existing garments, mostly vintage designer items: a radically different approach to the current fashion system and an impassioned appeal to make it structurally sustainable. This creates a new love affair with fashion, regardless of season, size or gender. Using the power of fragments of clothing, Lantink emphasises the wearer’s body shape. In this outfit he does so with a reference to his ‘vagina’ trousers that went viral in the video for Janelle Monáe’s song ‘Pynk’ (2018).

Ninke Bloemberg − curator of fashion

Collection Centraal Museum, Utrecht/ purchase 2019
© Centraal Museum Utrecht / Ernst Moritz