Glenn Martens left Diesel the same way he ran it: half-dressed, overstimulated and making out with somebody else’s idea of good taste.
Before the first look at Diesel Spring 2027, heavy breathing came through the speakers. Then the bass arrived. Then Donna Summer. Then Diesel-clad performers planted inside the audience started kissing like the front row had accidentally opened a group chat after midnight.
Four days earlier, Diesel announced that this would be Martens’s final collection. A respectable designer might have delivered a tasteful career summary. Martens gave the room a hickey. Six years did not end. They slipped out while the music was still playing.
Take your blazer off wrong
The first looks tried to behave. A pale biker jacket sat over lavender tailoring. Cream shirts, gloves and soft bags suggested a person with appointments. Dark suiting arrived with sunglasses and the sort of handbag that normally means business. Then the clothes began telling on themselves.
Shirts escaped through jackets. Cuffs kept multiplying. Trousers looked dragged through another garment on their way to the runway. Foil prints cracked open to expose fake layers underneath. Denim was coated and lasered until it passed for leather. Orchid-shaped holes ate into polos and knits as if prettiness had developed teeth.
Nothing was casually destroyed. Every rip had an architect. Martens made damage look high-functioning: bad decisions with exceptional construction, the morning after engineered before anybody had gone out.
At Diesel, getting dressed was only ever the first draft.
Denim had a chemical crush
Quiet luxury wants fabric to reassure you. This denim looked like it knew something about you and might post it. Indigo dissolved into dirty lilac, acid green and nightclub blue. Jeans resembled leather, satin, bruised skin and the metallic wrapper found in your pocket the next day.
The best looks made normal clothes lose composure. An oversized banker shirt met violet shorts shredded down to a rumour. A pink knit disintegrated over toxic green trousers. A coral slip seemed caught between lingerie, dress and evidence. These were clothes for people who understand that looking expensive and looking well-behaved are no longer the same ambition.
Martens’s trick was making an online image feel aggressively physical. Screens can flatten anything into content; these surfaces fought back. They peeled, cracked, flashed and frayed. You could almost feel the abrasion through the feed.
The audience became the afterparty
The kissing could have been a cheap stunt. Instead it finished the clothes’ sentence. Martens has always understood that Diesel dies when it is placed on a pedestal. It needs sweat, crowds, missed calls, public transport and somebody else’s hands on it. The collection looked touched before it had even left the runway.
Desire was not a theme pasted onto the show. It was the operating system. Tops slipped, layers doubled, dresses twisted and D-One bags hung from people who appeared to be leaving work, leaving a stranger’s apartment or refusing to explain the difference.
Even the cleaner looks felt post-contact. Pale green jeans glowed like a chemical flirtation. A long blue dress had been crushed into movement. Nothing stayed sealed around the body. The body kept winning.
A goodbye with bite marks
Martens had enough material for a polite retrospective: inflatable bodies, 200,000 condom boxes, a public rave in the rain, the studio livestream, the archive pile-up, last season’s citywide egg hunt. He ignored the museum tour and kept the pulse. Access, sex, spectacle and obsessive textile work were all present, but none arrived wearing a name tag.
The casting made the only openly sentimental gesture. Ella Snyder opened Martens’s first Vogue-reviewed Diesel collection, Spring 2022, and returned to close his last. By then Donna Summer was moaning, the audience was screaming and restraint had left the building several looks earlier.
Backstage, Martens put the attention on the team he leaves behind. That may be the smartest part of the exit. His real legacy is not one ripped jean or one viral set; it is permission. Diesel can now be denim, tailoring, serious technique, cheap thrill and mass spectacle in the same sentence without cleaning itself up for approval.
He leaves for Maison Margiela. Diesel stays at the party with its shirt open, its eyeliner intact and several excellent reasons not to go home yet.
He left the door open and the music loud.
