How Duran Lantink Won the Woolmark Prize

Ib Kamara and Donatella Versace presented Duran Lantink with the 2025 Woolmark PrizePhoto: GUINDANI

“Thank you! It was important for me to be loud. I mean I’ve always been not very quiet: mixing things and really, really going for it. But I think now more than ever, it’s important to be a bit more radical. Because if we’re not being radical, then what are we doing?”

So said Duran Lantink in Milan this evening, just moments after being awarded the Woolmark Prize on stage by Donatella Versace and Ib Kamara. They were amongst the judges at this year’s edition of an award that is fashion’s most venerable and arguably most influential: its earliest winners (and near-winners) during the 1950s include Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino Garavani, and Yves Saint Laurent.

This year, the prize pot was AU$300,000 (USD$187,000), a currency-specified amount that reflects Woolmark’s role to generate promotional noise about Australian merino wool. As Woolmark’s CEO John Roberts noted, this is a moment when wool is in especially urgent need of promotion: prices have dropped 40% since Covid and production has declined 20% in the last two years.

Finalists (from left to right): Luca Lin, ACT N°1, Louis Gabriel Nouchi, Balthazar and Ester of Ester Manas, Duran Lantink, Meryll Rogge, Michael Stewart of Standing Ground, Rachel Scott of Diotima, Raul Lopez of LUAR

Photo: Courtesy of the Woolmark Prize

If anyone can increase the volume of noise around wool right now, it’s Lantink. Ever since establishing his brand in 2016, his work has turned heads: His 2018 vagina pants for Janelle Monáe’s “Pynk” music video served notice of his arrival, while his runway shows following the label’s 2023 Paris debut have established him as an unrepentant rewriter of the rules of conventional fashion form. Inevitably, he has been strongly linked with creative director roles beyond his fledgling brand.

“For me Duran makes us feel excited about the future,” said Donatella Versace just after presenting the prize. She added: “This was a very strong year for The Woolmark Prize. It was very difficult to choose, but he was a clear winner.”

That last statement of Versace’s might sound like a contradiction, however it didn’t seem like it on the ground. This year Vogue was invited to sit in during the 10 minute presentations that the eight finalists are afforded to show their designs and share their creative credos. This was an experience that left you grateful not to be a judge, because while Lantink was indubitably the worthy-winner Versace described, his competition made coming to that decision just as conflictingly difficult as she hinted.

Every designer had used the AU$60,000 grant supplied by Woolmark to create collections that were both compellingly different and consistently appealing. Luca Lin of Act No. 1’s “classical garments made with freedom” represented an innovative vision of tailoring and outerwear that reflected his own identity and political ethos. Rachel Scott of Diotima declared: “Tensions are what I’m interested in; in materiality, in silhouettes, and in styling.” That interest was articulated in a collection that worked to render authentic a fashion-articulated image of her Jamaican homeland, and also present unfamiliar collisions of material and form, which included a highly impressive “leather jacket with fur collar” made in boiled compacted merino with collar-frothing yarn.

“Whether you are pregnant or want to do Ozempic, everything is possible at Ester Manas,” said Ester Manas during her presentation with life and business partner Balthazar Delepierre. Their dramatically elastic—and therefore unusually inclusive—approach to sizing, as well as the freshness of their philosophy and the wittiness of their rapport made their presentation a standout.

Yet so too was that of self-confessedly “obsessional” Louis Gabriel Nouchi, a former ANDAM Prize winner whose literature inflected vision of non-conformist masculinity was spiced up when his model stripped down his deadstock wool suiting to his Saint James rib-knit cream wool underwear. “The brand is balanced between being an armor and a shelter,” Nouchi said.

Then came Raul Lopez of Luar, whose “snatched, sexy nun” knit dress came with a cut-out wimple that had the judges audibly gasping: “molto bello,” Versace observed. As well as showing beautifully elaborate and autobiographical hand-made garments—what he called “the cuckoo-crazy pieces”—Lopez also presented “wool base layers for the Lululemon girls.”

Members of the International Woolmark Prize jury (from left to right) Tim Blanks, Woolmark CEO John Roberts, Danielle Goldberg, Simone Marchetti, Honey Dijon, Sinéad Burke, Donatella Versace, IB Kamara, Roopal Patel, Alessandro Dell’Acqua, and Alessandro Sartorti.

Photo: Courtesy of the Woolmark Prize

Marc Jacobs and Dries Van Noten alum Meryll Rogge delivered a compelling case for herself during a presentation that spelled out both the pitfalls and promise of building an independent brand. Wool garments generate about 30% of her revenues, and following her most recent show she said she is enjoying a relatively strong selling season. Yet her really excellent brand has yet quite to ignite (despite powerfully deserving to): you could see how transformational a catalyst winning Woolmark might prove.

Michael Stewart of Standing Ground told the jury that his current ambition is to show at Paris couture next January. A designer whose precise exactitude is matched by his power of expression, Stewart’s absolutely couture-level wool gowns with their architecture of hand-embedded beading and wool-felt insulated corsetry had Zegna’s self-confessed materials geek Alessandro Sartori especially entranced.

Fashion is very much about the intersection of aesthetic and moment—and in this moment, Lantink’s aesthetic has shaped up as a powerful signifier of now. When it was his turn to present (he was second in line) he told us:  “I’ve always been very obsessive about clothes. As a young child, I would sneak up into my mom’s room and I would start stealing her clothes and cutting them up and experimenting.” The Dutchman had used his grant from Woolmark to create garments that were incorporated in his fall 2025 collection Duranimal, including the eye-defying “floating” check wool skirt and some radical exoskeleton dresses knit in wool by a group of traditional Dutch knitters based in Amsterdam. “I’m really about shape, and forms, and trying to create new ideas,” he said.

Tonight, Lantink was the designer whose forms and creativity proved irresistible. But this was a vintage Woolmark year in which every finalist might conceivably have graced the podium.

Duran Lantink, with a model in his fall 2025 design

Photo: GUINDANI

Duran Lantink during his presentation to the judges.

Photo: Courtesy of the Woolmark Prize