Running on Diesel

KNOWN FOR his unconventional work with Lady Gaga, Italian/Japanese fashion director Nicola Formichetti has been named the new artistic director of the Italian fashion label Diesel starting with the brand’s autumn/winter 2013 collections. He will oversee all creative activities of the Diesel main line, including the areas of product, communications and interior design

“I finally met somebody as crazy as I am,” says Renzo Rosso, the founder of Diesel. “Nicola shares my visions and I find it incredibly inspiring to work with him: two creative planets are colliding to generate fresh, mad, insane ideas. With his help, I want to break more rules and bring the real Diesel to a new generation.”

Formichetti is equally as delighted. “When Renzo asked me, I remembered that Diesel and I are all about the same things. No rules! It’s about being empowered, It’s about being free. It’s a positive revolution. We’re going to reboot hit refresh. That’s our first project: we’re ripping apart everything to re-build something bigger. I want to get the creative young people around the world to be part of the process.”

Formichetti start his new role with the Diesel Reboot and plans to mobilise an emerging global creative community to collaborate with him. He will bring his own interpretation to the Diesel way of living – unpredictable, original, fun - coordinating the existing Diesel creative team and his new fresh recruits from different fields.

In designing his first capsule collection at Diesel, Formichetti pays tribute to the DNA of the brand through elements sourced from its 35-year historical archive. The tightly edited collection is comprised of garments that have been assembled entirely by hand with piece-by-piece construction in Italy and is being introduced with a revolutionary campaign to bring the history alive with an unprecedented communication language. 

Given access to the brand’s most inspiring, secretive and until now previously untapped resource – the unparalleled Diesel archive in Breganze, Italy – Nicola reviewed thousands of Diesel legacy pieces. From this immersion comes a two-tiered capsule collection spanning Diesel's mastery of both Denim and Leather, one that tips its hat in reverence to the brand’s history as well as pushing the fashion quotient further than ever before. Each and every item in the entire collection is painstakingly crafted by hand in order to deliver individual pieces of fashion history. 

By designing with a personal take on iconic references, he resets the visual language of Diesel with customised, detailed, and original new garments. “This collection is my homage to the DNA of Diesel,” he said. “Visiting the Diesel factories in Italy was incredible. The decision to use these found materials from the archive in a new way was immediate. These new, limited edition and artisanal explorations of denim and leather are two very important steps into designing the future of Diesel.” 

For the denim collection, items range from jackets to shirts and from vests to jeans. Highlights include western-inspired shirts with labour intensive “worn-in” effects, t-shirts taken over with immersive digital prints, and a selection of new jeans that use the same breakthrough fabric innovation previously only available in the Jogg Jeans range, but in a slim skinny fit. The manual stud and detailed hand-stitched patch application restricts production to only three pieces completed per day, and make this range extremely special and irresistible to the fashion lover in any city.

The denim collection had already been launched globally and the leather capsule edition will follow in February. 

Formichetti collaborated with renowned British photographer Nick Knight and the team of new media creative staff at SHOWStudio to roll out a series of digital campaigns for the launch. Shot entirely on iPhone, the campaign focuses on the glitching capabilities and filters of today’s best-in-class photo and video apps such as Glitche, Megaphoto, Instagram and PickPlayPost and is distributed across social sharing platforms including Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram.