Diesel Fall 2026 Ad Campaign

Cutout Couture

Review of Diesel Fall 2026 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Christopher Simmonds, Director Max Giles, and Photographer Verity Smiley-Jones

Diesel takes its Fall 2026 campaign on a decidedly unconventional world tour, as creative director Glenn Martens and art director Christopher Simmonds turn the familiar language of location photography inside out. Rather than flying a cast around the globe, photographer Verity Smiley-Jones captures the models in studio, where their images are transformed into life-sized cardboard cutouts and dispatched to London, Shanghai, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, and New Delhi. Local photographers then place these two-dimensional travelers into their own cities, creating a campaign in which the models stay still while the world moves around them.

The resulting images embrace the collision between artificiality and everyday life. Thick red outlines make no attempt to disguise the cutouts as real bodies; instead, they transform them into oversized stickers pasted onto bustling streets, beaches, rooftops, and markets. In Shanghai, elongated denim-clad legs interrupt a rain-slicked crosswalk; in Cairo, models pose against the pyramids with deliberately improbable proportions; and on Rio’s Ipanema Beach, their frozen fashion poses mingle with swimmers, football players, and sunbathers. Passersby drift through the compositions without being subordinated to the campaign, giving each image the unpredictable energy of the place in which it was made.

That framework feels particularly suited to Diesel, a brand whose strongest campaigns have historically understood advertising as something to play with rather than merely perfect. There is a knowingly cheap, almost DIY quality to the cardboard-cutout conceit that pushes against luxury fashion’s increasingly seamless image-making. The visible pixels, blunt red borders, warped scale, and awkward collisions are not problems to be polished away; they’re the joke. At the same time, the approach creates an effective visual system for a campaign assembled by multiple photographers across five cities, with the unmistakable Diesel red providing cohesion amid dramatically different environments.

More importantly, the concept gives some substance to the familiar campaign language of global community and multiplicity. Erika Kamano, Fish Zhang, Malak El Sawi, Sergio Richard, and Megha Singha aren’t simply tasked with reproducing a centralized aesthetic in different locations; their cities become active ingredients in the imagery. The D-ONE bag, D-COCCO sandal, denim, knitwear, and Stinger Watch travel alongside the cutouts, but the products coexist with street life rather than overwhelming it. If anything, the deliberately chaotic compositions demand a little hunting from the viewer, which feels appropriate for a brand that has never been interested in behaving like a conventional catalog.

In an era when a model can be digitally dropped anywhere without leaving the studio, Diesel goes amusingly analog: print them out, put them on a plane, and see what happens. The campaign turns the logistical absurdity of global fashion advertising into its central creative device, proving that sometimes the best way to broaden your perspective is to become completely two-dimensional.