Glenn Martens Signs Off From Diesel, and Margiela Gets His Full Attention

Diesel confirmed on Friday that Glenn Martens leaves after his Spring/Summer 2027 show in Milan on Tuesday, September 22, and stays on as creative director of Maison Margiela.

The announcement arrive on Friday, September 18, and it read more like a schedule than a eulogy. Diesel said Glenn Martens‘s tenure as creative director ends with the Spring/Summer 2027 collection, which WWD reports will be shown at 4 p.m. Milan time on Tuesday, September 22, the opening day of Milan Fashion Week. The brand will reveal the next chapter of its creative leadership later, and no successor has been named. Martens is not leaving the group: he stays on as creative director of Maison Margiela, the other house owned by OTB Group, a role he has held since January 2025.

Signal. What happened: Diesel announced on Friday, September 18, 2026 that Glenn Martens will step down as its creative director after the Spring/Summer 2027 show, closing a tenure that began in October 2020, while he stays on as creative director of Maison Margiela. Exact object: the Diesel Spring/Summer 2027 collection, Martens’s last for the brand, and the creative director post it vacates, with no successor named. When and where: Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at 4 p.m. in Milan, on the opening day of Milan Fashion Week. Source: Diesel’s statement as reprinted by FashionUnited, WWD’s report for the show time and OTB’s 2025 results rel  for the financial context. Why it matters: it ends the stretch in which one designer ran two OTB houses at once, leaves Diesel without a named creative lead months after OTB reported its best profitability in ten years, and turns Martens’s full attention to a Margiela show slotted for Paris on September 29. Earlier DRIFT: the Jil Sander FW26 “Fashion on tape” campaign story, on another OTB house under a newer creative director, and the story on Dario Vitale‘s appointment at Emporio Armani, the other major creative director move of the same week.

Backstage Pantheon: A Study in Three Postures

Renzo Rosso, Diesel’s founder and OTB’s chairman, said in the statement that Martens’s “contribution to Diesel has been extraordinary.” He credited the designer with changing how the brand is perceived and with building a bond with younger generations while preserving the openness, energy and accessibility the label has always claimed. Diesel’s own page for the show describes it as a “celebration of freedom, confidence, connection and desire,” an expression of the brand’s “For Successful Living” slogan, and carries a countdown to the runway on its Spring/Summer 2027 page.

Fashionista notes that the teaser for the show, posted to both Martens’s and Diesel’s Instagram accounts, features a model baring their backside on foggy glass, a continuation of the provocative campaign sensibility that helped push the brand beyond its denim roots. Diesel has not said who will pick up that thread.

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Bruges-born and Antwerp-trained, Martens took a bachelor’s degree in interior design in Ghent before applying to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp with no prior fashion education, and he graduated first in his class, according to Wikipedia’s biography. Jean Paul Gaultier recruited him after seeing his 2008 graduation show, WWD recalls, as a junior designer on the women’s pre-collection and the men’s label G2. He left in 2012, ran his own label for three seasons, and in 2013 became creative director of Y/Project after the death of its co-founder Yohan Serfaty.

The recognition came in sequence. Martens won the 2017 ANDAM Grand Prize, a prize OTB has long sponsored, WWD notes, and in 2018 Renzo Rosso invited him to be a guest designer for Diesel Red Tag, the brand’s experimental capsule series. In 2020, while still running Y/Project, he was named Diesel’s creative director. In 2022 he returned to Gaultier as guest couturier for the house’s Spring 2022 couture show. He left Y/Project in 2024, and H&M announced that November that it would collaborate with him for Autumn 2025. The Paris label shut in January 2025 after failing to find a buyer, per TheIndustry.fashion. Weeks later, on January 29, OTB named him creative director of Maison Margiela.

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Diesel had been without a creative director since 2017 when Martens took the job in October 2020, and Nylon‘s 2024 profile described a company that still sold well but no longer steered the culture conversation. Rosso had started the label in 1978 in Molvena, in the Veneto, picking a name that nodded to diesel as the alternative fuel of an oil-crisis era and pitching it as the alternative jeans brand, as OTB’s own brand history tells it. Martens introduced himself with a “Diesel x Diesel” campaign that mined the late-1980s archive, Fashionista recalls, and then made twisting, wrapping and distressed denim the house lang, techniques he had honed at Y/Project.

The celebrity traction followed. Martens told Nylon in 2024 that he had seen Rihanna and Michelle Obama wearing his designs, and in May 2024 WWD covered the custom Diesel looks he made for Kylie Minogue, Damiano David and Dove Cameron at the Met Gala. The wearer he singled out in that same interview, though, was a club kid he had bumped into at an underground rave in Paris.

The work also spilled past the runway. Diesel projects during the Martens years included a Pride capsule with the Tom of Finland Foundation that reached its third edition in 2024, a second collide with Lee, a lingerie and sleepwear line with Savage X Fenty in October 2024, and a capsule with David that November.

The job also closed a personal loop. Raised in Bruges, Martens described Diesel to Nylon as “the hype of my teenage years” and recalled an off-the-books dishwashing shift, at 14 or 15, that paid for his first pair of the brand’s jeans.

Chrome and Chaos: A Study in Controlled Detonation

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For Spring/Summer 2023, shown in September 2022, Diesel put an enormous inflatable sculpture in the room that CNN reports earned a world record for the largest blow-up artwork, and it opened the show to about 5,000 members of the public. Five months later, guests at the Fall/Winter 2023 show, invited with custom Durex six-packs, walked around a mountain of more than 200,000 condom boxes, and Diesel said it would distribute a further 300,000 in its stores worldwide. By September 2023 the invitation was a disposable camera and the show was run as a party, Highsnobietyreported. In February 2025, on the second day of Milan Fashion Week, models walked among 3.2 kilometers of graffiti-covered fabric made by about 7,000 artists, some of it draped around human-shaped inflatables, AFP reported.

The most literal version of the democratic idea arrived on September 23, 2025. Instead of a seated runway, Diesel put 55 looks inside transparent egg-shaped vessels scattered around Milan, 34 vessels across 18 locations, from churches and bars to gardens, theaters and bingo halls, by the counts in WWD. Almost 5,000 people signed up online for a game that ran about three and a half hours, and the five fastest finishers got to choose looks from the collection. “Everybody gets to be on the front row,” Martens said. OTB has since described it as the first completely public show of Milan Fashion Week, as FashionUnited summarized the group’s results.

The archive show followed in February 2026, on the opening day of Milan Fashion Week: a Bosch-style garden built from more than 50,000 objects, props and memorabilia drawn from Diesel’s archives and offices, WWD reports, arranged around a collection about the walk of shame. Martens described the premise as waking up somewhere without knowing what happened the night before, further reply source say as lists the clothes as denim with permanent creases, twisted constructions and distressed treatments. The Impression adds that his recent collections had started moving beyond the shrunken proportions and Y2K references that first caught Gen Z attention, toward longer silhouettes and more tailoring.

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Galliano’s decade at Margiela closed out with the Spring 2024 Artisanal show staged beneath the Pont Alexandre III in January 2024, which FashionNetwork says many rank as the standout Paris couture show of the decade. John Gallianohad led the house, founded in Paris in 1988 by Martin Margiela, since 2014, and OTB, its main shareholder since 2002 and outright owner since 2006 according to WWD, then handed the job to a designer it already had on its payroll.

Margiela’s Fall 2026 collection traveled. The house staged it in Shanghai on April 1, 2026, at a shipping-container dock on the city’s outskirts, with roughly a fifth of the show made up of Artisanal gowns that could be ordered afterward, and it ran a free public exhibition of Artisanal pieces from 1989 through 2025 on Yandang Road, WWD reports. Rosso told WWD the aim was for Chinese customers to think of Margiela as a home brand.

The results have followed the spectacle. Margiela’s sales rose 8.4% in 2025, the strongest growth of any OTB label, and the brand entered Canada, opened its first stores in Mexico and strengthened its position in the Middle East, per WWD‘s results coverage.

The Plastic Vestry: A Study in Suspended Time

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The next seven days are set. Diesel shows Spring/Summer 2027 at 4 p.m. in Milan on Tuesday, September 22. A week later, Maison Margiela is slotted for Tuesday, September 29 at 5:30 p.m. in Paris, according to the provisional Paris Fashion Week calendar, back on the city’s schedule after showing in Shanghai last season. Diesel has said only that its next creative leadership will be announced in due course.