Fashion

Glenn Martens Brought Diesel Back—Now He’s Leaving

BYMille Team

September 18, 2026

Fashion girls everywhere just fell to their knees. Glenn Martens is officially leaving Diesel after six years at the helm, bringing one of fashion’s more entertaining comeback stories to an end. The news was confirmed on Sept. 18, with Martens set to present his final collection for the Italian label during Milan Fashion Week next week.

Martens arrived at Diesel in October 2020, when the brand had plenty of name recognition but considerably less fashion-world heat. Founded by Renzo Rosso in 1978 and built into a denim behemoth through its provocative advertising and deliberately irreverent attitude, Diesel had spent much of the previous decade outside the center of the conversation. Martens understood that bringing it back required more than making a good pair of jeans. He needed to remind everyone why Diesel had been fun in the first place. And so began six years of wonderfully deranged denim.

Under Martens, jeans were shredded, distressed, peeled apart, printed, trompe-l’oeil’d, and manipulated into shapes that occasionally seemed to forget they were jeans altogether. The designer brought the technical experimentation that had made his work at Y/Project so compelling into Diesel’s considerably bigger universe, finding room for fashion-school weirdness inside a global commercial brand.

The clothes were only half the story. Martens understood the runway as entertainment at a moment when fashion shows were increasingly designed to live far beyond the room. For Spring 2026, he sent Milan on a citywide hunt for transparent Diesel eggs containing models. Even his Fall 2026 show turned decades of old Diesel props into an enormous installation populated by the debris of nearly 50 years of the brand having a very good time.

Under his tenure, Diesel became sexy again, but also funny and knowingly excessive. The Belgian designer leaned into the house’s existing appetite for provocation without simply recreating its ’90s and early-2000s greatest hits. Instead, he figured out what Diesel’s particular brand of bad behavior could look like to a generation discovering low-rise jeans, distressed denim and Y2K fashion with fresh eyes.

More importantly, the revival translated beyond fashion-week spectacle. OTB reported that Diesel recorded its best result in a decade in 2025, following years of investment in repositioning the brand. In announcing Martens’ departure, Rosso credited the designer with transforming perceptions of Diesel and returning it to the international fashion conversation.

His exit also makes considerably more sense when you look at his other job. Since January 2025, Martens has been creative director of fellow OTB label Maison Margiela, succeeding John Galliano while somehow continuing to run Diesel at the same time. With his Diesel chapter closing, Martens will remain within the OTB family and focus on Margiela.

For Diesel, however, the question is what comes after the man who made the brand feel culturally unavoidable again. No successor has been announced, with the company saying its future creative direction will be revealed in due course. Before then, there is one last show. Martens will present Diesel Spring/Summer 2027 in Milan next week, closing six years of denim experiments, enormous spectacles and enough beautifully destroyed jeans to keep Depop occupied indefinitely. And considering his track record, expecting a polite goodbye would probably be a mistake.

Glenn Martens Brought Diesel Back—Now He’s Leaving

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