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Diesel is famous for denim, but not the run-of-the-mill jeans-and-a-jumper kind. Seven thousand graffiti artists spraypainted nearly 2 miles (3km) of fabric, which was draped and swagged over the catwalk and seats of a concrete show space in Milan, transforming it into a rainbow-coloured, ballroom-sized skate park.
Models wore contact lenses that turned their eyeballs white, like horror-film dolls, or had clown smiles crayoned on to their faces. Hooded puffer jackets and corsets came with bumster jeans so impossibly low that they were fitted with adjustable internal underwear to hold them up, or tiny shorts that would make Daisy Duke blush.
Five years ago, Diesel had fallen off fashion’s radar. The people who wore Diesel’s low-rise jeans to go clubbing in the 2000s were no longer going clubbing, nor wearing cutting-edge denim. Every new generation wants going-out jeans but no generation wants the same going-out jeans that their parents wore.
The designer Glenn Martens, who arrived in 2020, has performed a remarkable turnaround, connecting the brand with generation Z consumers who love his oversized silhouettes and vintage washes.
The power of denim in fashion is that it is democratic and sexy, two attributes that Martens has leaned into. He has collaborated with Durex to make Diesel-branded condoms – 200,000 of which formed the backdrop to a Milan catwalk show – and staged 12-hour raves for thousands of people in Rome and London, in partnership with the online radio station NTS. Shoppers aged 16-25 now make up 36% of Diesel sales.
On the back of his Diesel success, Martens has become fashion’s breakout design star of 2025. He will graduate from denim to haute couture as the new creative director of Maison Margiela, the house founded by the avant garde designer Martin Margiela and more recently directed by John Galliano. Maison Margiela, the most cutting-edge couture house in Paris, will give Martens scope to elevate his iconoclastic fashion ideas to the highest level.
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The Paris-based label is owned by Renzo Rosso, the founder of Diesel, and Martens will continue to design Diesel alongside Maison Margiela. Martens’s profile will also be boosted this year when a collaboration under his name launches in H&M this autumn.
