This appointment with Glenn Martens in Diesel’s Milan HQ was his third collection presentation in six weeks. His endlessly intense working practice—back and forth between the big D and Y/Project—increasingly seems ingrained in the layered aesthetic that is its result. At Diesel the raw commodity that informs everything is denim. And while the brand presents a comprehensive offer of conventional blue jean pieces, in Martens’s hands the material is also infinitely moldable into more counter-intuitively cool pieces.
The techniques he uses are multiple, but in this collection they invariably involve some form of layering. A skirt was physically grafted over a pair of jeans, and a jacket conjoined with a skirt. A sort of technical Canadian tuxedo effect was created by layering bonded denim over unbonded. Denim was layered and then “baked” in a treatment that lent it a leathery look. Sometimes jersey was cut into denim pieces, or denim was cut into leather pieces. A series of non-denim archetype garments—windbreaker, dadcore fleece, puffer, trenchcoat, blazer—were brought into the denim fold. Only underwear definitely wasn’t denim, although it was denim-effect.
Some of the showpieces from September returned as editions of themselves, scanned as prints onto higher-distribution, lower cost wearable Diesel media. Martens said that these pieces—a literal layering of one collection into another—were amongst his favorites of this season. Layered knits, double-layered then distressed jerseys, layered poster prints, bouclé-effect recycled polyester base layers, and shinily bonded wool in tailoring were a few detours in materiality that added to the impact of this denim-rich but never monotonous Martens ensemble.