It was in a huge warehouse on the outskirts of Milan that Diesel held its spring-summer 2025 fashion show. The crowd gathered in front of the venue left no room for doubt: celebrities were expected in the front row.
Indeed, in the front row, the Italian singer Damiano Davidfrom the group Maneskin, and the Korean artist Hoshi13.6 million subscribers on Instagram between them, patiently pose for the photographers.
Like all the guests, they are seated on a bench covered with denim scraps. In reality, more than 14,800 kilos of fabric were needed to create the decor. They litter the entire podium, a huge rectangle in the middle of which are erected two columns, also covered with indigo canvas. The idea? To celebrate the beauty of waste, which, reused, can be used to create new clothes, but also rolls of fabric for the automobile and insulation industries. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed, in short.
The set, like the soundtrack of the show, recalls the history of denim and Diesel’s links with this very special material. Founded in 1978, the brand of the OTB group (Jil Sander, Maison Margiela, Marni, Viktor & Rolf) reigned over the 2000s with its faded jeans and its small label sewn on the coin pocket. Since the arrival of Glenn Martens as artistic director in 2020, the brand is back to success and riding the Y2K trend, which has been infusing fashion for several seasons.
A collection of illusions
On the models, jeans are indeed everywhere: masculine suits, devoured dresses, laminated skirts, flat boots… Fringes also punctuate the silhouettes of the show. Extra long, they give the creations of the Belgian artistic director a theatrical dimension.
The other gimmick of the collection is the work on the back of the clothes that reveal the body in a unique way or initiate ultra sexy trompe-l’oeil games. In reality, the whole show is made up of illusions. Thus leather, which at first glance looks like denim, while the jeans are coated to have the appearance and softness of lamb.
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Faded blue, black, grey… The palette used by Glenn Martens is dark, very dark. So the few multicoloured silhouettes light up the runway. They are composed of scarves tied like pareos, to create a printed crop top here, a sophisticated dress there, accessorised with Diesel’s future it bag. A handbag with sensual curves, called Play-Double-D.
