The Glenn Martens Diesel SS27 farewell show, staged last week inside Via Moncucco 35, a purpose-built club space in Milan, did not go quietly. Diesel had already confirmed that Martens would be leaving the brand after this collection, describing the moment as ‘the conclusion of a transformative chapter in the brand’s history.’ What followed on the runway, and in the tiered seating around it, was less a conclusion than a culmination.
Five years, one consistent argument
Martens joined Diesel in 2020, according to AP News, and from the beginning his tenure was organised around a single, coherent proposition: that desire, in all its awkward and cheerful excess, is not a provocation but a default state. The evidence accumulated season by season. At AW23 there were 200,000 boxes of Durex condoms distributed as part of the show. Catwalk invites took the form of butt plugs. Giant inflatable figures rode each other across the runway. Each gesture was, taken alone, easy to dismiss as stunt; accumulated over five years, they read as something more like a sustained thesis.
The final collection opened, sensibly enough, with clothes. Martens began with denim and leather worked at the level of craft his tenure made familiar: a leather vest topstitched in white contrast thread, layered over a ribbed knit jumper with jagged edges at the cuffs and neckline. Leather appeared buttery and cream, or brown and distressed. Some trousers that read as denim turned out, on closer inspection, to be leather lasered to mimic the weave of jeans, a trompe-l’oeil move that recurred across the collection, including in shearling effects on jackets and coats. The ribbed jumpers with their serrated necklines returned throughout, a kind of recurring motif, familiar enough to feel like a signature being signed off.
‘The collection is the essence of Diesel: disruptive, sexy, fluid, fun,’ Martens wrote in his show notes. ‘We are all in this together. Let’s take a ride one more time.’
Glenn Martens Diesel SS27: desire as choreography
While the models walked, something else was beginning in the audience. Diesel models planted throughout the seating started, gradually and then unmistakably, making out with each other, in pairs, in threes, in configurations that resisted easy counting. Loud moans came through the speakers. Guests, by most accounts, were surprised. The label described what was happening as ‘a series of performative interventions’ by the French choreography collective (LA)HORDE, whose dancers, dressed in Diesel, kissed and canoodled as the runway continued around them. The show, that is, had two surfaces running simultaneously: the collection proceeding in orderly sequence down the catwalk, and a kind of ambient theatre of bodies dissolving into each other in the seats.
The device is not without precedent in fashion’s history of spectacular finales, but it worked here because it was consistent rather than arbitrary. The Glenn Martens Diesel SS27 farewell was not using sex to shock an audience it assumed was prudish; it was using sex because sex had been the connective tissue of the whole project, the logic that made the denim and the invites and the inflatables cohere into something legible over time. Soigné Middle East notes that the show was staged inside Via Moncucco 35, a purpose-built club space, which meant the environment itself carried the same erotic charge as the interventions unfolding inside it. The venue was not incidental; it was part of the argument.
What happens next is already settled. WWD reports that Martens will devote himself fully to Maison Margiela in Paris, having managed the double commitment to both OTB-owned brands for the past year and a half. The runway orgy, in other words, was also a scheduling resolution. Martens leaves Diesel with a brand that is coherent, loud and, by any commercial measure, transformed. The next chapter, in Paris, will presumably be quieter, or at least differently noisy.
