Can Diesel Repeat Its Y2K Success?

MILAN — The group at Wednesday’s Diesel show in Milan’s Allianz Cloud enviornment was 5,000 individuals deep.

Filling a stadium isn’t simple, even when the tickets are free. And it wasn’t simply the scale of the viewers that was notable, but additionally its high quality — reflecting Diesel’s still-fresh transformation from dated designer-denim pioneer right into a cool style label for the younger and sizzling.

Gen-Z celebrities, like Gossip Girl actor Evan Mock, have been surrounded by rows of scholars and different younger style obsessives, dressed like characters straight out of “Euphoria” in candy-coloured suiting and glowing eye make-up.

Just some hours later on the Diesel retailer close to Milan’s Duomo, the occasion was already being broadcast on large screens, positioned subsequent to appears from designer Glenn Marten’s autumn lineup for the model.

Martens’ tackle Diesel harkens again to its height of cool in the early aughts, when it was greatest recognized for extremely low-rise — and extremely soiled — washes, with some iterations made to seem like the wearer had rolled round in a discipline of moist grass, or with rips sufficiently big to show complete swaths of gleaming thigh. His designs recall these days of maximum misery, with the silver foil on a pair of €495 ($486) denims flaking off for the sake of fashion. (Assortment items are largely priced between €500 and €1,000, a bit larger than the principle line, the place denims begin at €150.)

On the retailer, style youngsters rummaged round — like one carrying an Ambush sweatshirt — submitting via his €425 sleek-as-a-racecar baggage and €795 wrestling belt-style cummerbunds. Whereas many are absolutely followers of Martens’ work at Y/Project, the place he has helped lead the revival of that coarse-but-sexy look of the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, Diesel provides him one other stage of publicity and gives a broader vary of shoppers entry to his designs.

Diesel has all the time been a giant enterprise, and the engine of Italian entrepreneur Renzo Rosso’s OTB group— which additionally consists of Maison Margiela, Marni and Jil Sander — producing the biggest share of the group’s $1.5 billion revenues final yr.

However regardless of its continued heft, Diesel’s relevance had been waning for the reason that mid-2000s, when its tarnished, overworn look was changed on the mall by cleaner, darker propositions from the likes of J.Model and later Body.

Diesel’s makes an attempt to rekindle the patron fireplace—together with a four-year partnership with Lady Gaga-collaborator Nicola Formichetti within the 2010s—got here as momentum was draining from the premium denim class, in addition to the department shops and malls that had championed the class. The model struggled to reverse the tide, and by 2019, its US subsidiary filed for bankruptcy protection.

Then got here Y/Mission’s designer Martens, who was initially tapped for a one-off collaboration via the model’s “Purple Tag” programme in 2018.

Two years later, in 2020, because the coronavirus pandemic was making it particularly powerful for unbiased designers, Rosso convinced Martens to come aboard as Diesel’s creative director, tasking him with a revamp the corporate’s product providing and picture whereas persevering with to design Y/Mission.

The guess on Martens seems to be paying off. Whereas mum or dad firm OTB doesn’t escape gross sales for particular person manufacturers, it cited progress on Diesel as a key driver of development in 2021. Gross sales rose 16 % year-on-year, and have been flat from 2019. Not extraordinary given the massive will increase in gross sales seen by many rivals after the primary yr of the pandemic, however respectable contemplating the variety of undesirable wholesale accounts Diesel had exited as part of its repositioning.

As OTB weighs a possible IPO, Diesel’s continued success underneath new CEO Eraldo Poletto, who joined in July, will stay essential to the well being of the corporate.

On-line, the social media dialog round Diesel has expanded, up 69 % of the previous yr, in accordance with monitoring agency Launchmetrics. Spikes have been attributed to Julia Fox’s Ye-styled Diesel look final February, Nicole Kidman in Diesel on the duvet of Good journal in August, and a rise in influencer placements.

Retail companions, too, are more and more enthusiastic. After exiting scores of underperforming retail places and discount-prone wholesale boutiques — and sacrificing round €400 million in turnover alongside the way in which — the model is lastly profitable the high-fashion adjacencies Rosso needs. Simply earlier than New York Vogue Week, the corporate co-hosted a late-night celebration with upscale unbiased retailer The Webster at a membership in East Williamsburg, celebrating a capsule assortment of Glenn Martens’ designs for Diesel, reworked within the retailer’s within the signature pink.

Laure Hériard Dubreuil, The Webster’s founder and CEO, referred to as Martens’ Diesel an “avant-garde voyage.”

After all, two collections is never sufficient to vary the notion of a model as huge and well-known as Diesel — particularly when your entire product providing is way broader than Martens’ imaginative and prescient. But it surely’s clear that Rosso has hit on one thing along with his new star — the take a look at shall be whether or not the model can win favour past the fervent style fan.