Diesel came in on day one and did what Diesel does best, which is make a mess of good taste and somehow make it look great.
Glenn Martens opened Milan Fashion Week with a show that felt chaotic, hedonistic, and very awake. The set was a full collision of Diesel memory and excess, stacked with 50,000 pieces of memorabilia pulled from the brand’s past, and the clothes carried that same after-hours energy.
On the runway, the creative director stayed in his strongest territory and pushed it further. Denim came worked over and manipulated, with creased, distressed, and deconstructed finishes that looked handled rather than pressed. Knitwear and outer layers carried the same roughness, with surfaces that felt scraped, wrinkled, and deliberately imperfect. The collection had that familiar Diesel tension of body-conscious silhouettes and damaged textures, but this season it was sharper.
Bright, candy-toned hits cut through the grime and heaviness of the styling at exactly the right moments. Instead of softening the collection, the colour gave it lift and charge. It pushed the after-hours mood away from collapse and into something more playful, more brazen, and much more alive. We also got a culture crossover moment with Rema walking the show, placing one of the week’s most talked-about music names inside the brand’s opening-day runway and widening the conversation around the collection beyond fashion circles.
There is a reason Martens’ Diesel shows keep setting the conversation early in Milan. He understands spectacle, but he also knows how to make texture and finish do the real work. AW26 opens in a messy, maximal mood, and Diesel is the one that switched the lights on.
