Glenn Martens on Diesel’s comeback: “We didn’t think I’d go this far”
At the dawn of a new life, Glenn Martens does not seem particularly seized by doubt or by any kind of pressure. At the end of June, as men’s fashion week is in full swing, the designer welcomes us into the immaculate offices of Maison Margiela. Despite the late hour, artisans are still busy around the upcoming haute couture collection that will be unveiled a few days later. It is the first time Glenn Martens will present for this house, where he became artistic director last January. The man seems strangely calm, even smiling, allowing himself a few jokes. It is a safe bet that he has spent the overwhelming majority of recent days – and nights – wandering through the labyrinth of his new realm, refining and reworking details that are no longer really details. Yet fatigue and stress seem to slide off him.
If we wanted to meet him now, it is not only because he has just become the new strong figure at Maison Margiela, succeeding John Galliano, and because his first show for the brand was praised by all. It is also because Glenn Martens has, since 2020, been the artistic director of Diesel, and the key actor in the brand’s reinvention. The transition from mass-market denim to haute couture fabric has turned all the eyes of the industry on him, consecrating him as the great attraction of the moment.
“When Renzo Rosso, the CEO of Diesel, asked me to take charge of the brand, I was young and snobbish, I didn’t know if I wanted to make jeans and t-shirts,” he recalls, seated behind a bare desk he has not yet had the time to fully inhabit. Born in Bruges, this graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp trained in Paris alongside some of the industry’s biggest names. A series of encounters that would lead him towards a rather conceptual approach to fashion, before becoming artistic director of the label Y/Project in 2013. Glenn Martens’s work would then catch the attention of Renzo Rosso when he won, four years later, the Andam prize (National Association for the Development of the Fashion Arts). Nothing, at the time, seemed to predispose this pure product of luxury, devoted to cerebral and “niche” fashion, to collaborate with a ready-to-wear brand in total decline, such as Diesel.
The boom years under Renzo Rosso
“Renzo Rosso insisted a lot,” Glenn Martens specifies. “We circled around each other for a long time. After having designed a capsule collection as part of Diesel’s ‘Red Tag’ programme, he formalised his request during lockdown. A period in which I told myself that I could no longer only speak to an elite. Speaking through Diesel meant speaking to everyone, and sparking a positive change on a large scale.” Before becoming the juggernaut we know from the 1990s and 2000s, the label was founded in 1978 in Molvena, a small town in the Veneto region. Above all, it was the fruit of a gamble by Renzo Rosso, the entrepreneur dubbed by the industry “the cowboy of ready-to-wear” because of his business “coups”, always involving in one way or another the motif of denim. Renzo Rosso established himself with Diesel at a time when transgression and audacity rhymed with communication.
Upon its release, the advertising series “The Daily African” (broadcast widely at the end of the 1990s) showed Black men and women, incredibly sexy, embracing in wood-panelled, quintessentially WASP interiors. Images that scandalised a certain America and sparked conversation around the world. With Diesel, the businessman was in some sense making a promise of a more inclusive future to an entire young generation awakening to politics. The slogan “For Successful Living”, coined in 1991, became Diesel’s marketing mantra, and the brand crossed borders under the leadership of its founder. Now at the head of the OTB (“Only The Brave”) fashion group, Renzo Rosso had built a true conglomerate, which included not only Diesel and Maison Margiela, but also Marni, Jil Sander, Viktor & Rolf, and the highly fashionable Amiri. So many labels driven by the same values of openness and inclusion.
At the height of its glory in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Diesel struggled painfully through the 2010s. Once the emblem of the “rebel” jean, the brand gradually locked itself into a fairly impersonal aesthetic. Once provocative and underground, it now appeared outdated against the rise of minimalism and streetwear, which had become the new mainstream. The multiplication of retail outlets, franchises, outlets, and other licences also blurred its commercial positioning, caught somewhere between “accessible luxury” and “mass-market label.” Add to this the general erosion of the denim market over the years, itself challenged in Europe by the rise of giants such as Levi’s and Wrangler. The decline seemed complete, despite the resources made available by Renzo Rosso. Everything, therefore, had to be (re)built in 2020 when Glenn Martens arrived.
Before this, Diesel had never appointed an artistic director. That may well be one of the reasons that explains its loss of momentum. Glenn Martens, for his part, wanted, at the time of his appointment, to take full control of the house: “I asked to be named artistic director of Diesel as a whole, not just of ready-to-wear. I needed to also oversee the vision for the stores and the campaigns. With Renzo Rosso, the deal was to achieve a 360-degree vision. Even if he might not have thought I would take it quite that far.”
The comeback driven by Glenn Martens
Two years later, Glenn Martens has clearly established himself as the architect of a 13% economic growth, itself the driving force behind the OTB group’s overall revenue, which by the end of 2023 had reached €1.9 billion. In 2024, history repeated itself: despite a slight decline in total turnover, the Italian ship maintained its course of progression. How, then, to explain this spectacular rebirth in barely four years? “I defined a ‘brand bible’ and a set of rules,” Martens tells us, as if it were a simple magic formula. In reality, he set about restructuring the label’s design team: he established a new creative framework, laid the foundations for a standardised drawing style, and applied what he had absorbed during his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. “I was taught to stay as close as possible to an initial artistic concept, and to adhere to it rigorously.”
And the concept in this case? “A return to Diesel’s original ethos,” he reveals. “The secret to a house’s success is often right there under the table, especially with brands that are already forty years old. Through successive reinventions, they can sometimes end up forgetting their very reason for being.”
Glenn Martens strikes at the very heart of the house’s historical DNA while imprinting it with his own touch and the freshness of his vision: “One of the brand’s great strengths was always that very pop, funky, colourful, happy side—like MTV in the 2000s. And those were precisely the elements it had completely abandoned. I simply exhumed those archives, from which I was able to redefine the creative pillars of the new Diesel. I told my teams: ‘from now on, we stick to this, we insist on it, if necessary for years, until it lands. And that’s that!’”
His first tour de force was to bring denim back to the centre of the Diesel village. He reinvented jeans, giving them asymmetrical cuts, distressed effects, patchworks. “I was born in 1983. I was conditioned by that Diesel with its strong artistic expression.”
“Diesel is denim.” At his Spring-Summer 2025 show, Glenn Martens made this mantra official, filling the hangar where the runway took place with nearly 15,000 kilos of denim scraps—an homage to the beauty of the fabric and the craftsmanship behind its creation. Glenn Martens also takes pride in having placed eco-responsibility back at the heart of his work. Today, more than half of the OTB group brand’s collections are made from recycled cotton. “We push for the circularity of our production with the same energy we put into innovation,” he insists.
The designer has also reintroduced certain signature details from Diesel’s 1990s heritage, transforming them into commercially successful emblems. The oval “D” logo, for example, has been blown up into XXL format on bags (notably the 1DR bag, which has become an it bag), as well as on belts, jackets and tops. Martens has also revisited denim jackets in the form of corsets, while experimenting with plasticised or resin-coated materials that freeze garments like artefacts.
At the service of this new aesthetic and a discourse updated to the times, Diesel shows made their grand return in 2022 during Milan Fashion Week. Suggested by Renzo Rosso, Glenn Martens eventually allowed himself to be convinced of the soundness of this strategy. The Italian brand had not staged a runway show since 2007. In Milan, Diesel shows under Glenn Martens, typically presented each September and January, have considerably accelerated the brand’s overhaul, bringing the label back to the forefront of the international fashion scene. The Diesel revolution led by Glenn Martens also stems from this—from his extraordinary shows, remarkable for their size and scale, rivaling certain industry giants, in Milan and beyond.
In keeping with his universe, which blends references to the 2000s, clubwear, and a post-apocalyptic spirit, these runway shows operate under the banner of total subversion. The pieces seen there are torn, laminated, battered. His silhouettes, often topped with white or black contact lenses, send chills down the spine: both feminine and masculine, the wardrobe is far from “easy.” The spectacle, at times oppressive, embraces a deliberate excess while emphasising the values of openness and inclusivity so dear to Renzo Rosso. Among the most striking shows, Spring-Summer 2023—with more than 5,000 spectators connected via a giant Zoom salon—created massive buzz on social media. The advertising campaigns, conceived in the 90s tradition, once again made a strong impact, exemplified by the installation of a gigantic condom shop in Milan (in partnership with Durex), followed by a global distribution of said condoms.
“It’s very important for me to carry these messages of freedom, especially in countries where this doesn’t exist or no longer exists,” concludes Glenn Martens. Inclusive, provocative, showing non-normative bodies and explicit sexuality, Diesel’s marketing style—its style, full stop—remains transgressive. And it clearly aligns itself with the aspirations of Gen Z.
First published on gqmagazine.fr
