Glenn Martens Is Leaving Diesel After This Week's Milan Show

Diesel and Glenn Martens are done. OTB Group, Diesel's parent company, confirmed on September 18 that Martens will step down as creative director once he shows his final collection for the brand — the spring/summer 2027 womenswear show in Milan on Tuesday, September 22. He took the job in October 2020, so this closes a six-year run.

He isn't leaving OTB. Martens keeps his other title, creative director of Maison Margiela, a job he's held since January 2025 after John Galliano's departure from that house. Running two creative directorships inside the same parent group at once was never going to last; OTB has now made official which one he's keeping.

Renzo Rosso, Diesel's founder, credited Martens in the announcement with transforming how the brand is perceived and rebuilding its pull with younger customers, framing his run as a foundation the house will keep building on. Diesel hasn't named a replacement. The company says its next creative direction will be announced "in due course" — which is corporate for not decided yet.

What Martens actually did at Diesel was turn its runway stops from trade appointments into public spectacles. The spring 2024 show at Scalo Farini was a 7,000-capacity, eight-hour rave open to the public and free for students, staged in pouring rain with models in metallic body paint and gypsum-plaster makeup, broadcast on a screen the size of a building face. That's the kind of stunt that gets covered outside the fashion press, and it's a big part of why Diesel — a brand that had drifted toward reading as a mall staple with a recognizable logo — was back in the conversation by the time Martens got there.

That makes Tuesday's show the actual event to watch, not just another Milan date on the calendar. Whoever OTB puts in the job next inherits a Diesel that matters again in a way it didn't in 2020; what they do with a house this closely built around one designer's ideas about spectacle is the story once a successor actually has a name.