What happens when the designer who made a brand relevant again is no longer the designer it needs?
On September 18, Diesel announced that Glenn Martens will leave his position as Creative Director after the presentation of Spring/Summer 2027 in Milan on September 22. No successor has been named, and, importantly, Diesel has not given a specific reason for the departure. The official language is celebratory: Martens transformed the perception of the brand, reconnected it with younger generations and brought Diesel back into the global fashion conversation. Renzo Rosso called his contribution “extraordinary.”
So why now?
That is the more interesting question.
Martens arrived at Diesel in October 2020, at a moment when the brand needed more than another collection. It needed a cultural reset. His answer was not to make Diesel more luxurious, quieter or more respectable. Quite the opposite. He made it louder, stranger, more physical, more internet-native and, crucially, more aware of its own history.
Denim became distorted, exaggerated and reconstructed. Fashion shows became public events rather than industry rituals: thousands of people, raves, provocative installations, absurd quantities of objects, city-wide interventions. The famous inflatable bodies, the Durex-filled set, the free rave and the 2025 Milan egg hunt all operated on the same principle: Diesel should not simply sell clothes; it should create a world people want to enter.
And commercially, the strategy appears to have produced tangible results. OTB reported that Diesel achieved its strongest profitability in a decade in 2025, attributing the improvement to the investments made in the brand’s repositioning.
In January 2026, Andrea Rigogliosi was appointed Diesel CEO, bringing a distinctly commercial and retail-oriented background from Miu Miu and Fendi. At the time, Rosso described Diesel as being at a “crucial stage” of its evolution.
This is where the departure becomes more complicated.
Martens is not leaving a failing experiment. He is leaving a machine that, by OTB’s own numbers, has become considerably healthier. And he is not leaving the group: he remains Creative Director of Maison Margiela, the Paris house he took over in January 2025 after John Galliano’s departure. Maison Margiela itself recorded 8.4% sales growth in 2025, the strongest growth among OTB’s brands that year.
The most obvious explanation, therefore, is also the least dramatic: focus.
For more than a year, Martens has effectively been designing two very different futures inside the same group. Diesel is a democratic, accessible, mass-cultural denim brand; Margiela is an intellectual, artisanal and historically loaded fashion house. Maintaining both at the highest creative level is an extraordinary workload. His decision to concentrate on Margiela is consistent with the direction his career has already taken.
But that does not make the question disappear.
If anything, it makes it bigger.
Because Martens’ greatest achievement at Diesel may have been proving that the brand did not need to behave like a conventional fashion house in order to regain cultural relevance. He understood something that many brands still struggle with: desirability does not necessarily come from exclusivity. Sometimes it comes from participation.
Diesel became a place where fashion, nightlife, memes, bodies, sex, music, denim and spectacle could collide without asking permission. It was fashion with the volume turned up.
The danger now is not that Diesel will suddenly lose everything Martens created. The danger is that the brand could misunderstand what made the transformation work in the first place.
A new creative director could attempt to repeat the Martens formula: bigger sets, stranger denim, louder casting, more viral stunts.
But imitation would miss the point. Martens’ Diesel was successful because the chaos had a coherent cultural logic behind it. The spectacle was not decoration around the product; it was part of the product’s identity.
And this is precisely where the next chapter becomes fascinating.
Diesel has already undergone the difficult part of the transformation: it has become culturally relevant again. The question is what happens after the comeback.
Can Diesel evolve without becoming a parody of its own irreverence? Can it grow commercially without becoming too polished? Can it maintain accessibility while increasing desirability? And, perhaps most importantly, can the next creative voice make Diesel feel like the present rather than like a beautifully preserved version of the Martens years?
The September 22 show will therefore be more than a farewell. It will be a strange kind of test.
Martens is closing the chapter he helped write. The next person will have to decide whether Diesel needs another revolution; or whether the real challenge is learning how to live with the one it has already had.
For now, Diesel has given us no answer.
And perhaps that is the most interesting thing about the announcement.
The question is no longer how Glenn Martens made Diesel cool again. The question is what Diesel does when being cool is no longer the problem.