The Designer Will Present His Final Diesel Collection at Milan Fashion Week While Remaining Creative Director of OTB Group’s Maison Margiela
Glenn Martens is stepping down as Creative Director of Diesel, bringing to a close a six-year tenure that helped return the Italian denim brand to the center of the fashion conversation.
Martens will present his final collection for Diesel on Tuesday, September 22, during Milan Fashion Week. OTB Group, which owns both Diesel and Maison Margiela, said a successor will be announced in due course. Martens will remain within the group as Creative Director of Maison Margiela.
“Glenn Martens’ contribution to Diesel has been extraordinary,” said Renzo Rosso, Founder of Diesel and Chairman of OTB Group. “Through his vision, talent and commitment, he has transformed the way the brand is perceived, forging a strong connection with younger generations and creating a solid foundation for its future.”
Rosso added that Martens “brought Diesel back to the center of the global fashion conversation while preserving the openness, energy and accessibility that have always distinguished us.”
Martens joined Diesel as Creative Director in 2020, although his relationship with Rosso and the brand began earlier. In 2018, he was invited to participate in Diesel Red Tag, the experimental project through which the company collaborated with outside designers.
His eventual appointment gave Martens a considerably larger mandate. Diesel had been one of the defining fashion brands of the late 1990s and early 2000s, but by the time of his arrival it was looking to reconnect its denim heritage and provocative advertising identity with a new generation.
Martens did so without attempting to turn Diesel into a conventional luxury house. Instead, he leaned into the brand’s irreverence, sexuality and pop-cultural instincts while using denim as an increasingly experimental design medium. Distressed surfaces, trompe-l’oeil treatments, twisting, wrapping and unconventional fabric manipulation became recurring elements of his collections, building on the experimentation that had already defined his work at Y/Project.
Just as important was the world built around the clothes. Under Martens, Diesel’s Milan shows became events in their own right. Inventive staging, unconventional collaborations and democratic show formats helped reinforce the idea that Diesel could participate seriously in fashion while retaining the accessibility and provocation central to its identity.
That approach helped reconnect the brand with younger consumers and restore a level of cultural relevance that had been difficult for Diesel to maintain in the years before Martens’ arrival. More recently, his collections began moving beyond the shrunken proportions and overt Y2K references that initially helped capture Gen Z attention, introducing longer silhouettes and more tailoring as the brand sought to broaden the conversation.
The creative transition now arrives alongside change on the business side. Andrea Rigogliosi was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Diesel earlier this year, filling a position that had been vacant for almost three years while Rosso maintained oversight of the brand.
For Martens, however, the departure does not signal an exit from OTB. Instead, it concentrates his work within the group around Maison Margiela.
His appointment at Margiela marked one of OTB’s most significant creative moves, placing Martens at a house whose history of experimentation, deconstruction and transformation has clear parallels with his own design vocabulary. He presented his first Artisanal collection for Maison Margiela during Paris Haute Couture Week in July 2025.
The arrangement gives Martens’ final Diesel show an unusual sense of closure. He is leaving the brand he helped reposition while remaining a central creative figure within the company that owns it.
What Martens leaves behind at Diesel is more than a particular denim treatment or silhouette. His tenure demonstrated how the codes that once made Diesel culturally potent — provocation, accessibility, humor and a willingness to disrupt fashion conventions — could be reconsidered for another generation.
His Spring 2027 collection in Milan will provide the final chapter.