![]() ![]() “We’re never going to be luxury, and we’re not claiming to be luxury. “The really great thing about this brand is that we’re quite individual in the industry,” he said. “What we're doing now this year is continuing with that really pushing it further.”Īnd all the while he is striving to return Diesel to its position as a brand which not only reflected pop culture but drove it-and did so for a ton of people. What makes Martens’s Diesel sing (sorry) is that it’s done with wit and grit and love for the idea of how it can be an inclusive and democratic brand for younger folks, rendered in ways which are meaningful to them (Martens is driving a real and principled stance on sustainability without falling into greenwashing.) “It was important to really understand or reinforce our fundamental statements, so we did it last year,” Martens said. Shrewd, but never cynical, it must be said. The venue had been art directed to this startling effect by Ye collaborator Niklas Bildstein Zaar (he worked on Donda), which suggests that Martens is as shrewd about contemporary pop culture as he is knowledgeable about its low-slung, hip-jutting, flesh-showing past. ![]() Yet with this fall 2022 collection we’re getting the real measure of Martens’s big ambitions for the brand. On the strength of the two collections he has done thus far, he has achieved it, and how. That gets us to the perfect-well, kind of-segue way to what Martens (who still creatively directs Y/Project to much and rightful fanfare) has been charged with doing at Diesel, which is: Make something magical and fantastic out of that most democratic and utilitarian of fabrications, AKA denim, for the everyday world. Except, that was no UFO, but the Diesel logo rendered special effect style, flickering and burning up the evening, a moment of imagination in an otherwise humdrum world, with cars zipping back and forth on the highway under this eerie spectral form. Given everything that’s going on these days, I doubt many of us would blink an eye at a visit from extraterrestrials-heck, we might even welcome them with open arms. Anyone who checked out Glenn Martens’s personal Instagram the day before his Diesel show (last year Martens was made creative director of the Italian jeans brand that has pretty much ripped up the denim rule book since forever) would have seen he had posted a video of a pulsating red object in the Milanese night sky.
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