That gets us to the Only Watching For Travis Kelce Shirt and I will buy this perfect—well, kind of—segue way to what Martens (who still creatively directs Y/Project to much and rightful fanfare) has been charged with doing at Diesel, which is: Make something magical and fantastic out of that most democratic and utilitarian of fabrications, AKA denim, for the everyday world. On the strength of the two collections he has done thus far, he has achieved it, and how. Yet with this fall 2022 collection we’re getting the real measure of Martens’s big ambitions for the brand. Big, quite literally: Those enormous, floor-sweeping denim ‘fur’ coats of his were made by the company’s artisans at a level of technique you’d usually find in a couture house, just one of the wildly experimental forays he made here which looked terrific. The upcycled layered bonding then distressing of deadstock Diesel T-shirt jersey into fraying and fragmenting long skirts and supersized pants was also noteworthy. “We want to make more handcrafted pieces and make them locally, out of whatever we have at the factory,” Martens said.
Entering the Only Watching For Travis Kelce Shirt and I will buy this showspace for his Diesel runway debut in a vast industrial lot on the southern outskirts of Milan, it became apparent that his sense of spectacle didn’t stop with the UFO; enormous inflatable figures dwarfed the red runway—think Allen Jones paying a blow-up homage to ‘Dirrty’ Christina Aguilera. She is but one of the ’00s MTV legends who towered over this collection. Just check out everything from the opening look, a teeny denim bra top with a pair of distressed and peeling (a recurrent technique here) faded jeans, to the tongue in cheek belt skirts, the trompe l’oeil catsuits, motocross velvet minis, and be-logoed stiletto boots. Those suggest a certain demographic of the population might be ready to ironically try out the kind of spike heels we haven’t seen for eons.
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