By 2018, Diesel was losing the cultural relevance that once made it stand out. Heavy discounting and mass-market retail had weakened its image, while younger consumers increasingly saw the brand as a symbol of the past. Under Glenn Martens, Diesel began a new chapter. The brand kept its rebellious spirit while adding bold design, elements of high fashion, and a modern approach to digital culture. This helped Diesel rebuild its identity for a new generation.

This case study examines the strategy behind Diesel’s transformation and the decisions that brought the brand back into the spotlight.

Diesel was founded by Renzo Rosso in 1978, at a time when jeans were mostly seen as everyday clothing. Rosso approached them differently. He made denim more premium and gave it a more rebellious and individual character. This became especially visible in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Diesel’s advertising was often unusual and provocative. The brand did not try to look like everyone else. I suppose this was a big part of why it connected so well with younger people.

The problem started when Diesel became more successful. In a rush for higher profits, the brand introduced cheaper products, opened more stores, and became much easier to find. From a business point of view, reaching more customers made total sense. But it made me wonder: what happens when a brand built on being a cultural outsider suddenly becomes available everywhere? In Diesel’s case, it completely killed its exclusivity. The rebellious image was still there, but the actual products no longer felt special.

Nicola Formichetti became Diesel’s Creative Director in 2013 and tried to change this. His campaigns were much more experimental, even running advertisements on platforms like Tinder and Pornhub. They definitely got attention, but when I looked at this period more closely, something did not quite add up. The advertising looked bold and unexpected, while the clothes themselves were often much more commercial. It made me realise that changing a brand's image is not the same as fixing what the brand actually sells.

By 2018, Diesel tried to pivot back toward a premium position by pulling lower-priced products off the shelves. However, that shift came at a brutal cost. Revenue plummeted by around €320 million, and Diesel’s US division ultimately filed for bankruptcy. This massive drop proved to me that simply hiking up prices cannot automatically make a brand desirable again. Customers already have a fixed idea of what a brand represents, and rewriting that narrative takes much more than just altering a price tag. This is where Glenn Martens’s work becomes interesting. He became Diesel’s Creative Director in 2020 and did not simply try to recreate the old Diesel. Instead, he took some of its original attitude and changed the way it was expressed.

Denim became more experimental, the collections shifted closer to high fashion, and products such as the 1DR bag gave the brand something new to talk about. For me, this feels much more like a real relaunch than simply bringing back an old image.

While working on Diesel, I actually changed my own opinion about what the brand’s main problem was. At first, I thought it was mostly a marketing issue - that Diesel had lost its cool image and just needed better communication. But after comparing Formichetti’s period with Martens’s, I started to see it differently. The root problem was in the product. If the product does not give people a reason to care, even a brilliant campaign only works for a short time.

That is the biggest takeaway for me from Diesel’s history. A brand’s heritage can give it a strong starting point, but it cannot replace active creativity in the present. For a relaunch, I would not try to copy what Diesel did in the 1990s. I would keep the core parts that made the brand recognizable - its attitude, experimentation, and willingness to take risks - and find a fresh way to make them relevant to the people buying fashion today.

Glenn Martens seems to have figured out early on that if Diesel wanted young people back, it had to stop making plain, forgettable jeans aimed at suburban malls. So he took the brand's core material - denim and pushed it into something closer to art. Runway collections under him stopped playing it safe and became genuinely experimental: models walked out in pieces with melted-looking fabric, rough unfinished textures, coatings that looked almost like liquid rubber. Bringing that kind of craftsmanship to Milan Fashion Week is really what gave the brand its old prestige back. Diesel felt exclusive again, and that's exactly what pulled in a trend-driven crowd.

But the comeback wasn't just about denim. Martens built out an entire ecosystem of instantly recognisable products - reworking the whole clothing line, blending nostalgic touches with more futuristic shapes. Probably the smartest move in all of this was bringing back the old archival "D" logo. This big metallic emblem started showing up on almost everything - knitwear, chunky leather belts, and of course the now-famous 1DR bag. One strong visual stamp across both clothing and accessories gave Diesel a unified look, and that's what got young consumers wanting to buy it, wear it and post it.

Financially, a lot of this comes down to one smart idea: accessible luxury. On the Milan runway, Diesel puts out wild, high-end pieces mainly to generate buzz and media attention. But in actual stores, that same high-fashion energy gets translated into much more affordable stuff - t-shirts, belts, entry-level accessories. It lets younger buyers feel like they're part of the Diesel subculture without paying full luxury prices. In short, it's a balance between creative risk-taking and steady, dependable sales.

Glenn Martens got it - nobody wants to watch a boring, super serious fashion show online. So he basically turned Diesel's Milan runways into content made specifically to go viral. For his first big show as creative director, he stuffed the whole room with a giant inflatable sculpture of models frozen in wild, exaggerated poses - and it actually broke a world record for size. Later on, he went even further and built a literal mountain made of 200,000 Diesel-branded condoms as the show's backdrop. Guests weren't just sitting there watching quietly - the second they saw it, phones came out and everyone started filming. These shows weren't designed to just "look nice" in person. They were built from the ground up to blow up on TikTok on their own, without anyone forcing it.

Diesel skipped the whole boring playbook of paying random A-list celebrities millions just to wear their clothes once. Instead, they built their own squad - real people who already had that rebellious, underground energy the brand is going for. When Julia Fox got photographed on the street in DIY low-rise jeans and tops literally made out of Diesel belts, it didn't look staged. It looked messy, chaotic, and real, like something an actual person threw together, not a marketing team. By working with niche internet personalities instead of polished Hollywood names, Diesel avoided that fake "corporate ad" feeling. It made the brand feel less like a company selling you something and more like a club you actually wanted to be part of.

Traditional high fashion has always had this reputation of being exclusive and closed off - like it's only for rich people and industry insiders. Diesel straight up broke that wall down. Martens opened up online registration and gave away thousands of free tickets to regular students and young fashion fans who had zero industry connections. People stood in long lines in the rain just for a shot at getting a seat in Milan. That one move alone built massive loyalty with young audiences. It showed Gen Z that Diesel actually respects the people who support the brand and genuinely lets them feel like insiders - not just customers watching from the outside.

On September 22, 2026, Glenn Martens closed out his six years at Diesel with his final show during Milan Fashion Week - a Spring/Summer 2027 collection that became far more than a standard runway presentation. Instead of a regular show, he partnered with the artist collective (LA)HORDE and placed 200 performers directly into the crowd, dressed to look like ordinary guests. The moment the music started, these performers broke into a chaotic, sensual scene right in the seats, building toward one final head banging moment as the show ended. Reaction online split almost immediately, with opinions dividing sharply over what the show actually achieved.

For many, the show was exactly what a Diesel finale should be, and that's what drove most of the praise online. People pointed to how fully it matched the identity Martens had built since joining the brand in 2020 - loud, playful, and openly body positive, the same tone that had turned his Diesel shows into full cultural moments year after year. Backstage, he explained the choice himself: "Every season we try to do something unexpected. This one was a bit more … experimental. I think the whole celebration of being body positive and loving each other is part of the Diesel DNA." He received a standing ovation from the room, and outlets covering the show called it "everything we hoped it'd be. Hot, sweaty and unmistakably Diesel." For this side of the audience, it read as a fitting, high-energy goodbye rather than a random stunt.

For others, the issue wasn't the tone of the show, but what actually spread online afterward. The clips that circulated most were of the performers themselves - the moment the music dropped and they broke into touching, moaning, and eventually head banging together in the seats, set to the track "Love to Love You Baby." Those specific clips ended up dominating feeds, while shots of the models walking the actual collection got far less attention in comparison. So while some viewers saw pure, classic Martens, others pointed out that the clothes - the knitwear, the fake leather prints, all of it - barely got discussed once the performance clips took over.

The show achieved exactly what it was designed to do: get Diesel talked about everywhere, all at once. Within hours, it spread across social media and fashion outlets worldwide. On that level, it worked completely. The problem is that almost none of the conversation it generated was actually about the collection. Diesel ended up trending one final time, but the clothes themselves stayed largely out of the discussion.