With year-on-year sales up 13% in 2023, Diesel under Glenn Martens—and the OTB Group more broadly—is proving itself a winner in these most divisive of times for the industry. What’s exceptional about Diesel is that rather than hustling for space at the apogee of price point and craft (where most of the other winners are), it expresses itself as a democratic alternative to conventional luxury defined less by altitude and more by attitude.
This pre-spring collection continued the Martens formula. In between dropping some satisfyingly scurrilous nuggets of gossip—“but please save that one for your book!”—he toured a collection that handily spanned the streets to the steps of The Met. As ever, the core of the collection was built around denim. Here black denim was tailored, dyed, and coated to create an effectively ironic post-executive power wardrobe. A successful two-year-old line of denim-effect underwear was reconfigured as denim-effect-underwear outerwear. Said Martens: “It’s really blurring the archetypes and the typology of items and also blurring what is underlayer or outer layer.” More blurring occurred in matte metallic miniskirts split by zippers that allowed you to repurpose them as wearable luggage. Roughly cut oversized pieces in denim bouclé knowingly contrasted the raw and the cooked. The Big D motif was reexpressed as a cutout embroidery placed against the left pec on pieces that might leave you with a Diesel-branded sunburn.
A new version of the cute scrunched handbag shown during last season’s mass-video-conference runway came in patent. There was a fresh array of generically satirical sneakers whose retail prices, Martens said, are being consciously reduced—another differentiator between Diesel and the rest—in order to widen their attainability. True to Martens’s core aesthetic, the collection was sophisticatedly rent and bent in order to generate an aura of absolutely zero shits given.
