With year-on-year gross sales up 13% in 2023, Diesel underneath Glenn Martens—and the OTB Group extra broadly—is proving itself a winner in these most divisive of instances for the business. What’s distinctive about Diesel is that slightly than hustling for house on the apogee of value level and craft (the place a lot of the different winners are), it expresses itself as a democratic different to standard luxurious outlined much less by altitude and extra by perspective.
This pre-spring assortment continued the Martens formulation. In between dropping some satisfyingly scurrilous nuggets of gossip—“however please save that one in your e-book!”—he toured a set that handily spanned the streets to the steps of The Met. As ever, the core of the gathering was constructed round denim. Right here black denim was tailor-made, dyed, and coated to create an successfully ironic post-executive energy wardrobe. A profitable two-year-old line of denim-effect underwear was reconfigured as denim-effect-underwear outerwear. Stated Martens: “It’s actually blurring the archetypes and the typology of things and in addition blurring what’s underlayer or outer layer.” Extra blurring occurred in matte metallic miniskirts cut up by zippers that allowed you to repurpose them as wearable baggage. Roughly lower outsized items in denim bouclé knowingly contrasted the uncooked and the cooked. The Massive D motif was reexpressed as a cutout embroidery positioned in opposition to the left pec on items that may go away you with a Diesel-branded sunburn.
A brand new model of the lovable scrunched purse proven throughout final season’s mass-video-conference runway got here in patent. There was a contemporary array of generically satirical sneakers whose retail costs, Martens mentioned, are being consciously decreased—one other differentiator between Diesel and the remaining—with the intention to widen their attainability. True to Martens’s core aesthetic, the gathering was sophisticatedly lease and bent with the intention to generate an aura of completely zero shits given.
