Diesel Spring 2027

Glenn Martens ended his five-year run at Diesel exactly as he began it: by treating denim less as a fabric than as a problem to be repeatedly dismantled and rebuilt. Spring/Summer 2027 pushed that approach into trompe-l’œil prints, laser treatments, cutaways and hybrid garments, merging trucker jackets with quarter-zips, jeans with shirts and denim with leather effects. The result is recognisably Martens — chaotic, sexual and deliberately difficult to categorise — but there is also a sense of him emptying the toolbox one final time.

The best clothes are the ones where the construction feels genuinely inventive rather than merely provocative. Denim is coated and lasered to resemble leather, lightweight shirts are printed to look like heavy outerwear, and garments appear to have been caught halfway through dressing. The “pantasock” extends jeans into the foot, while skirts and trousers are cut away to expose the body in unexpected places. Even the most extreme pieces retain Diesel’s underlying practicality: they are fundamentally familiar wardrobe objects that Martens has distorted until their original purpose becomes almost unrecognisable.

The show’s performance was considerably harder to ignore. Two hundred performers from (LA)HORDE moved through the audience, gradually escalating from unsettling interruptions to pole dancing, headbanging and simulated intimacy as Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” intensified. It was pure Diesel — pleasure, discomfort, sex and spectacle deliberately collapsed into one experience — but the theatricality occasionally threatened to overwhelm the clothes. When the final looks arrive as shredded denim dresses, barely-there pieces and microscopic HotPants, the collection is almost competing with its own staging.

Still, Martens leaves Diesel with a remarkably coherent visual identity. His greatest contribution has been proving that a denim brand does not have to remain trapped inside jeans, and SS27 brings that idea to its most excessive conclusion. The finale, worn by Ella Snyder, who also opened Martens’ first Diesel show, neatly closes the chapter. It is less a reinvention than a final explosion of the vocabulary he spent five years building: denim, distortion, desire and just enough chaos to keep it from becoming ordinary.