Duran Lantink "DURANIMAL" Fall 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Duran Lantink “DURANIMAL” Fall 2025 Ad Campaign by Art Director Jop van Bennekom and Photographer Juergen Teller with models Alex Consani and Leon Dame

Duran Lantink’s Fall 2025 campaign, DURANIMAL, is nothing if not audacious. Photographed by Juergen Teller and styled by Jodie Barnes, the imagery stars Alex Consani and Leon Dame in a series of juxtapositions that test the limits of taste and instinct. Set against zoo enclosures, aquariums, and patches of urban greenery, the campaign embraces animal prints, latex-like body paint, and, most provocatively, the infamous molded breastplate that stirred controversy on Lantink’s runway earlier this year.

The visuals are instantly striking, relying on the awkward, sometimes absurd, tension between couture-clad bodies and staged natural habitats. Zebra stripes clash with python skins, leopard spots with glass enclosures of baboons and penguins. The result feels part camp, part satire: fashion as spectacle, unafraid to toy with the grotesque. Teller’s signature raw flash aesthetic only heightens the sense of intrusion, pushing models into an uncanny space between animal display and performance art.

The press release frames the campaign as an interrogation of “the boundaries between the human and the animal, artifice and instinct, beauty and spectacle.” In practice, however, what dominates here is artifice and spectacle. The imagery is bold and cheeky, but the provocation can feel blunt—shock often eclipses subtlety. The reappearance of the molded breastplate underscores this dynamic: a deliberate provocation, sure, but one that risks leaning more on recycled scandal than on fresh narrative depth.

Still, there’s something undeniably magnetic about DURANIMAL. Lantink thrives in this territory of friction—between camp and critique, glamour and grotesque. By placing couture against zoo glass and aquarium tanks, he raises uncomfortable questions about how fashion frames bodies, how we perform identity, and what constitutes beauty when stripped of context. Whether the campaign succeeds in pushing those questions meaningfully forward is debatable, but it succeeds in grabbing attention, which, in today’s fashion landscape, is no small feat.

In the end, DURANIMAL proves less about instinct and more about image, but that’s Lantink’s enduring gamble: courting controversy as a way to expose just how thin the line between wildness and artifice really is.