Weeks before this show the Diesel team dispatched six miles worth of bolts of white fabric to art schools and street art groups in China, South Africa, the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere. When they returned to be used as the set for today’s show they had been covered with the (mostly graffiti style) handwriting of more than 7,000 people from across the world. Also covered in more spray can cursive ware the raunchily contorted titanic blow-up dolls from Diesel’s Spring 2023 show, which was upcycled here as a further effort to present the world’s biggest street art installation.
Although that record attempt apparently didn’t quite hit with the Guinness people, it did serve as a highly appropriate backdrop for a collection in which Glenn Martens radically broadened his handwriting at Diesel. Speaking at a preview he said the concept for this afternoon’s show was “Coco Chanel goes to Balmoral and gets trashed on sherry with The Queen.” That sherry must have been spiked with something, because today Martens’s design veered from extremely high (his cheeky Coco homages in bouclé), to extremely low (with the cut of his closing bumster jeans, the bumster skirts, and bumster leather pants) via extremely trippy (a fantastically artisanal houndstooth jacquard, and a creepily alien moulded rubber ‘cable knit’ sweater).
The opening look of gray bouclé jacket, washed black denim peplum/cummerbund/skirt, and jacquard panties encapsulated the tricolore of high, low and whoa that Martens was waving. His silhouette, similarly, was often tri-divided, the sportswear’s conventional top and bottom disrupted by that mid-cheek to iliac crest intersection. Below this he framed that expansive offer of bumster cuts. The bouclé looks, in gray and then pink and green, were not what you’d see on Rue Cambon, yet obviously derived from Coco’s canonical creations. However Martens’s spiked-sherry disruptions of cut and silhouette and the interplay of bouclé with bouclé print were radical and impressive remixes with a visual melody all of their own.
The Queen came into it via that classic English houndstooth blurred into an intoxicated soft-focus through Diesel’s material development. Later some nerdy debutante looks featured knit jacquard check twinsets and full flocked tulle skirts that bore an almost dismissively disrupted resemblance to conservative couture norms. Similarly cheeky were the full coats and trapeze dresses in more blurred vision jacquards.
Cheekiest of all were the bumsters, highlighted in a closing set of looks that were topped with 2D shirt fronts in order to emphasize the party at the back. Other highlights included bouncy ruffled knits in acid tones, the boiled knit and leather jackets whose pucker and crumple became attractively warped decorative features, and a series of plasticated denim pieces whose shrink wrapped finish nicely complemented the uncanny blankness of the models’ stares. A black leather quilted jacket stitched in trailing scarlet thread was another teasing reference to his sherry quaffing muse.
Maybe it’s because Martens has been in a lull between second jobs, but this collection was more stuffed with innovation, irreverence and ingenuity than any Diesel outing he has taken us on thus far.
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