Diesel

What do New York City’s mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and Diesel’s creative governor Glenn Martens have in common? They both love a scavenger hunt. Following last month’s “Zcavenger Hunt” that brought 2,000 followers out for Mamdani, Martens threw a similar event in Milan tonight—the Diesel Egg Hunt—that attracted more than 3,000 pre-registered participants.

Both men’s initiatives were designed to rally the public behind their relative causes. As Martens declared via his press release soapbox: “This is Diesel for the people, a collection discovered by the public at the same time as everyone else.” Everyone else was that shadowy fashion elite, the sinister cabal of editors, buyers and influencers that might typically expect to sit front row at a Diesel show and decree it a hit, miss or meh. Tonight, however, Martens left these illuminati in the dark.

Instead of showing his looks on a closed runway, he took them to the streets. Diesel dressed 55 models and installed them in 34 “eggs”— large, open-backed oval vitrines—which were then distributed at locations around Milan (with the support of the city’s mayor). As Martens explained in a pre-hunt briefing, each egg was labelled with a QR code. He added: “The first five people who find all of the eggs will win a full look of their choice from the collection, tailored for them. And the second five will win any Diesel denim look of their choice. And then the next ten get to choose an accessory. And for anyone who wants to be part of it without going on the hunt, we’ll be having a party in Piazza Beccaria where everyone can come together. There’ll be a free concert and drinks. Cute huh?”

And it actually was. Martens himself has quite enough runway on his plate over at Maison Margiela right now. Plus the schedules are heaving with so many shows that this one-season runway sabbatical made sense, at least on paper. In practice it’s too early to say, because at the time of writing the Diesel Egg Hunt is still going on.

Despite Martens’s democratic instinct, realpolitik demanded he play nice with Big Fashion. Which is why Vogue Runway and a few other powerful lobbyists were allowed to glimpse the collection immediately before Diesel’s eggs were hatched. The designer was especially proud of a newly developed fabrication that saw recycled poly-satin interwoven with denim, which was then distressed and treated to create iridescently surfaced dresses and biker-accented outerwear.

Womenswear bi-material jumpsuits seemed partially torn asunder at the crotch, but kept just barely in place by web-hemmed panels of knitwear. Floral dresses were embedded below layered manes of distressed chiffon at the shoulder. Tailoring was shaped in protective double-neoprene, and was sometimes patterned via a sort of x-ray process through which bleach applied through lining and construction left a rough outline stenciled on the surface of the garments.

The wildness of pattern, proportion and presentation reflected the brief Martens had shared with his design team: “the animal within.” This looked to be another effective campaign moment in the designer’s ongoing term as Diesel’s elected top dog.