# Glenn Martens Is Leaving Diesel After Six Years of Turning It Around By The Current Tribune · Fashion · Published Mon, 28 Sep 2026 07:33:44 GMT Source: The Current Tribune — https://currenttribune.com/article/glenn-martens-exits-diesel-creative-director Glenn Martens turned Diesel from a brand people associated with early-2000s denim nostalgia into one of the most talked-about names in fashion again. Now, after six years, he’s walking away — and he’s doing it with one more show still left to give. ## The End of a Six-Year Run Martens joined Diesel in October 2020 as the brand’s first-ever creative director, a title that didn’t exist there before him. That detail matters: he wasn’t stepping into a role with an established playbook. He was inventing what “creative direction” even meant for a brand that, at the time, was best known for its past rather than its future. Six years later, Diesel is a fixture of fashion week conversation rather than a nostalgia act, and that shift is largely credited to him. His final Diesel show is set for September 22 at Milan Fashion Week — meaning the exit isn’t immediate. Martens gets a proper send-off on the runway before he closes the chapter. ### What He Actually Built Martens’ Diesel wasn’t subtle, and that was the point. He leaned hard into denim as a material for experimentation rather than just utility, pushing unusual textures and silhouettes through seasonal collections that consistently generated the kind of social media attention most heritage brands can’t buy. His set designs for Milan shows became events in their own right, treated as spectacle rather than backdrop. A few specific projects defined the era: - The 1DR shoulder bag, which debuted for Spring/Summer 2022 and became one of the brand’s most recognizable viral accessories - The Only Desire fragrance collaboration with Dove Cameron - A jelly-textured collaboration with Brazilian footwear brand Melissa that leaned into exactly the kind of playful, internet-friendly design moment Diesel needed None of these were quiet, safe bets. All of them worked. ## Renzo Rosso’s Send-Off Diesel founder Renzo Rosso didn’t hold back in praising Martens’ tenure, saying: “Through his vision, talent, and commitment, he has transformed the way the brand is perceived, forging a strong connection with younger generations.” That’s not boilerplate departure language — reconnecting a legacy denim brand with a younger customer base is precisely the hardest problem in fashion right now, and it’s the one Martens is credited with solving. ### Where He’s Headed Martens isn’t leaving fashion, and he isn’t even leaving OTB Group’s broader orbit in spirit — he’s simply consolidating. He will remain creative director at Maison Margiela, a role he already holds. Running two major creative director positions simultaneously is a demanding balancing act even for the most in-demand designers working today, and stepping back from one to focus fully on the other is a far more common move than an outright exit from the industry. ## An Open Question at Diesel No successor has been named. Diesel’s statement indicates a replacement will be announced “in due course” — corporate language that buys time but also leaves a real gap. Whoever takes over inherits a brand that’s in a genuinely stronger cultural position than it was in 2020, but also one whose recent identity is now inseparable from a single designer’s aesthetic fingerprint. That’s a tricky asset to hand off: the next creative director has to honor what worked without simply imitating Martens, or risk the brand feeling like a tribute act to its own recent past. ### Why This Departure Lands Differently Creative director exits happen constantly in fashion, but most of them read as a brand correcting course after a rocky run. This one reads the opposite way — a designer leaving a project at what looks, by most measures, like its cultural peak. That’s a harder transition for a brand to manage than replacing someone whose work had clearly stalled, because there’s no obvious problem for a successor to fix. There’s just a very specific creative voice to somehow follow. ## The Wider Pattern in Fashion Right Now Martens isn’t the only major name reshuffling a creative director title this month. Emporio Armani just handed its own creative reins to Dario Vitale, and the broader NYFW and Milan Fashion Week seasons have been unusually heavy with executive-level fashion news layered on top of the runway shows themselves. There’s a real argument that fashion is in the middle of one of its periodic generational shuffles, where a wave of houses simultaneously decide it’s time to hand their identity to someone new — or, in Martens’ case, decide it’s time to consolidate that identity into fewer hands rather than more. What separates Martens’ move from a typical shuffle is that he isn’t disappearing to take a job at a rival brand or stepping away from the industry to reset. He’s simply choosing depth over breadth, betting that one house getting his full attention beats two houses getting a divided one. Fashion doesn’t always reward that kind of restraint — plenty of designers chase multiple titles specifically for the cultural cachet of holding them simultaneously — which makes the decision to scale back somewhat unusual for a designer at this stage of his career, with this much momentum behind him. ## What This Means Diesel now faces the classic post-visionary problem: how do you follow an act that fundamentally redefined the brand, without simply trying to recreate it? Martens’ final show on September 22 will be watched as closely for what it signals about his creative instincts going forward as for how it closes out his Diesel era. And for Maison Margiela, gaining his undivided attention could mean an even sharper, more focused creative direction there — assuming the shift in energy from a two-house balancing act to a single-house focus translates the way it usually does for designers who’ve made similar moves before.