Diesel 'The Lineup' Fall 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Diesel ‘The Lineup’ Fall 2025 Ad Campaign by Glenn Martens & Christopher Simmonds

Diesel has never been a brand to play it safe, and with its Fall 2025 campaign, creative director Glenn Martens and art director Christopher Simmonds bring their trademark irreverence to full force. Titled The Lineup, the campaign presents a motley crew of unapologetic individuals posed against the backdrop of a mug shot wall. It’s cheeky, it’s theatrical, and it continues Diesel’s ongoing experiment in using fashion as a kind of cultural courtroom—where conformity is the only crime worth prosecuting.

Visually, the campaign is a study in contrasts. A 6’0” brunette with lipstick smeared from a night of indiscretions wears sedate tailoring that suggests the guilty pleasure of contradiction. Nearby, playful cat and duckling prints clash delightfully with the deadpan stares of their wearers—an irony that Diesel knows how to wield with precision. A girl in a shearling denim mini dress seems arrested mid-revelry, while the Severe Tailoring and Fluffy Knit gang looks like the after-hours have truly caught up to them. Accessories also make their statement: the sparkly Grab-D bag (with its claw clip handle) feels part-evidence, part-trophy, while boots like the D-Venus Tube and D-Tex lug sole ground the lineup in Diesel’s signature mix of grit and wit.

The brilliance of this campaign lies in its refusal to pander to the glossy perfection of luxury advertising. Instead, Martens and Simmonds continue Diesel’s trajectory of championing individuality, diversity, and inclusivity in its casting and styling. This is a fashion house that doesn’t simply sell clothing—it sells attitude, and more importantly, the freedom to not blend in. That’s refreshing in a landscape often dominated by dreamworld tableaux designed to feel unreachable to the average consumer. Diesel flips that on its head, inviting us all to stand out—even if it’s in the form of a faux mug shot.

That said, the campaign’s humor walks a precarious line. The use of mug shot imagery may strike some as edgy or ironic, but it risks trivializing the very real injustices of the criminal legal system—particularly in the U.S., where incarceration is both systemic and deeply racialized. Adding to the discomfort is Diesel’s positioning as a luxury label. Profiting from an aesthetic that mimics criminalization, without acknowledging its human cost, can feel exploitative—especially when the punchline is being delivered from within a fashion fantasy. Models recite the house’s long-standing tagline, “For Successful Living,” as if from behind a booking placard—a line once aimed at satirizing the hollow promises of consumerism, now landing with a thud in this context. What could have been a sharp critique begins to feel like an uncomfortable joke. A more thoughtful approach might have involved voices with lived experience or partnerships tied to justice reform, transforming irony into layered commentary. As it stands, the campaign remains in familiar Diesel territory—irreverent, inclusive, self-aware—but it also serves as a reminder that satire in luxury fashion is most powerful when it critiques systems from the outside, not when it borrows their imagery without reckoning with their weight.

Ultimately, The Lineup builds a case not for rebellion, but for individuality—the Diesel way. This is fashion that asks not to be idolized from afar, but to be lived in, laughed in, and yes, even hauled into the spotlight for. After all, in Diesel’s court, the only guilty verdict is failing to have fun.