Milan Fashion Week just delivered its most charged, most disruptive, and most completely unforgettable moment of the season. And it belonged entirely to Glenn Martens and his final collection for Diesel.
The venue was transformed into a purpose-built club space pulsing with the kind of energy that makes you forget the outside world exists. As the show began, so did a series of extraordinary performative interventions by (LA)HORDE, the acclaimed artist collective from Marseille. 200 performers embedded in the audience engaged with guests and each other in actions that were by turns liminal, sensual, unsettling, and utterly unavoidable. The tension built throughout. The discomfort and surprise mounted. And the entire happening culminated in one magnificent climax and release, with a rework of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” filling the space in the most perfectly chosen finale imaginable.
“The party always comes first at Diesel. It’s about inclusivity, self-expression, pleasure and the democracy of experience. The collection is the essence of Diesel: disruptive, sexy, fluid, fun. We are all in this together: let’s take a ride one more time,” said Glenn Martens.
And what a ride it was.
The collection itself is a love letter to everything Martens has built at Diesel, distilled into its most brilliant, most playful, and most electrifying form. Merged pieces run throughout, garments joined and layered in the most unexpected ways, with the seams defined by cutaway orchid embroidery that became the collection’s most poetic and recurring motif. A waxed leather jacket over a topstitched blazer over a ribbed knit sweater merged with a tracksuit collar. Pantasocks in leather and denim. Over-the-knee skirts demure from the front, dramatically cut away at the back. Question everything.
Denim — forever at the heart of Diesel’s DNA — was pushed to its most innovative limits. Coated then lasered for a leather effect. Trompe l’oeil prints bringing winter textures to lightweight spring fabrics. Micro shorts on jersey. Bootcut jeans with insets at the inner ankle. Straight-leg jeans coated to look like leather. Jeans with a denim shirt attached as if tied at the waist. And the most micro denim shorts imaginable closing the collection like the most perfect manifesto of the party.
Cutaways revealed skin in the most considered and deeply sensual way: a polo-dress trimmed with orchid embroidery, knit jacquard sweaters with petal shapes seemingly eaten into the fabric, slim pants and tailored skirts impossibly cut away at the waist. T-shirts, sweatshirts, jersey dresses reduced to their most essential and most daring form.
The accessories were equally extraordinary. The iconic D-ONE bag arrived in an extraordinary range of treatments, textures, and shades, now accompanied by the most ironic leather charms — a sock as a pouch, a newspaper as a clutch. The new LOCK-D bag uses the Double D motif as its lock. Footwear features the collection’s signature buckle across pumps, heeled mules, stretch boots, and clogs. And lingerie was introduced for the very first time, boned and embroidered with orchids.
The orchid, it should be noted, is everywhere. In the jewellery. In the embroidery. In the cutaways. And as the signature flower of Diesel’s newest fragrance, Only Desire. A symbol of beauty, desire, and the kind of beauty that blooms in the most unexpected places.
The final look was worn by Ella Snyder, who also wore the very first look of Glenn Martens’ debut Diesel collection. A full-circle moment as moving, as intentional, and as completely magnificent as everything that came between it.
Glenn Martens’ Diesel was always about more than fashion. It was about freedom, desire, inclusivity, and the belief that the party is for everyone. And this final collection was the most extraordinary, most joyful, most deeply felt farewell we could have asked for.
