Glenn Martens shows his final Diesel collection on the opening day of Milan Fashion Week. He leaves the brand he spent six years remaking, and stays inside the same group to keep running Maison Margiela.
The announcement came on 19 September, three days before the show. Martens will present Diesel's Spring 2027 collection on Tuesday 22 September, the day Milan opens its womenswear week, and then step away. He remains Creative Director of Maison Margiela, the other OTB house he took over last year. Diesel has not named who follows him.
Renzo Rosso, who founded Diesel and chairs OTB, called the designer's contribution to the brand exceptional. He credited Martens with shifting how the label is read, pulling in younger shoppers and putting Diesel back into the conversation it had drifted out of. The praise reads as a summary of the whole tenure, not a parting courtesy.
The denim years
Martens joined Diesel as Creative Director in October 2020, after an earlier turn on the experimental Diesel Red Tag capsule in 2018. His brief ran wide, covering the clothes, the campaigns, the store interiors and the tone of the whole thing. He treated denim as a laboratory, fading it, coating it, distressing it, twisting the silhouette until a pair of jeans looked like something else.
His first full runway, for autumn 2022, drew serious notice. The shows that followed turned into public events. A spring 2023 presentation seated close to 5,000 people. Another edition became a free outdoor rave for 7,000. Diesel under Martens sold hard and played loud, and the two things fed each other.
The numbers moved with the noise. OTB's 2025 full-year results showed Diesel at its best profitability in a decade, the payoff for several years of repositioning. The brand widened its own store network in the same stretch, with flagships opening in Berlin and Seoul. A house that had leaned on licensing and wholesale looked like a fashion label again.
He found a brand selling jeans and left one that stages spectacles. The clothes were always the argument underneath the party.
The Splendid EditTwo houses
The Margiela job arrived in January 2025. Martens succeeded John Galliano, who had spent a decade at the French house, and unveiled his first Artisanal collection at Paris couture in July of that year. Running two OTB labels at once was always going to end with a choice, and the choice has now been made in Margiela's favour.
That house rewarded the bet. Maison Margiela counted among OTB's stronger performers, with sales up 8.4 percent in the year Martens took charge. The wider group reported turnover of 1.7 billion euros and EBITDA of 237.3 million. Diesel appointed Andrea Rigogliosi as chief executive in January 2026, giving the brand a commercial anchor as its creative chapter closed.
So the Milan show carries a double weight. It is a Spring 2027 collection, and it is a goodbye, staged on the first afternoon of a week already thick with debuts and returns. Martens leaves Diesel in far better shape than he found it, and he walks out the door still working for the same man who hired him.
Glenn Martens shows his last Diesel collection on the opening day of Milan Fashion Week. Courtesy of Fashion PR Firm