Weeks before the show, Diesel shipped off six miles of pristine white fabric—blank canvases sent hurtling into the hands of art students and street crews across China, South Africa, the US, the UK, Europe, and beyond. When the fabric finally returned, it was obliterated in layers of graffiti, scrawled-over by more than 7,000 people. And as if the set wasn’t chaotic enough, Diesel also resurrected its now-iconic titanic blow-up dolls from Spring 2023, their raunchy, twisted forms now covered in even more spray-painted declarations. The result? A global street art fever dream—an attempt, supposedly, at the world’s largest street art installation. (Guinness didn’t bite, but let’s be real: their loss.)

This anarchic backdrop set the stage for Glenn Martens to push his Diesel universe even further. “Coco Chanel goes to Balmoral and gets trashed on sherry with The Queen,” was how he framed the concept. Which—okay. But if that sherry wasn’t laced with something far stronger, then Martens’ imagination certainly was. The show swung wildly from high to low, from razor-sharp bouclé suits (a cheeky nod to Coco) to slashed-and-burned bumster jeans, bumster skirts, bumster leather pants—a full-scale attack on the waistline. Somewhere in between, things got psychedelic: houndstooth blurred into a near-hallucinatory jacquard, rubber “cable knit” sweaters morphed into something vaguely alien, and the silhouettes themselves fractured into three-piece puzzles, with hips and pelvises getting their own starring moment.

Take the opening look: a gray bouclé jacket (proper, respectable), paired with a black denim peplum/cummerbund/skirt hybrid (weird, rebellious), and jacquard underwear peeking out (downright unhinged). A tricolor of high, low, and what the hell is going on here. The bouclé, in all its gray-pink-green variations, was not Rue Cambon material, but rather, a deconstructed, disrupted remix of Coco’s legacy. A spiked-sherry hallucination of classicism gone rogue.

The Queen, meanwhile, made her spectral presence felt in a houndstooth pattern that had been warped into an intoxicating soft-focus print—like a stately British fabric that had spent too long in a fogged-up club bathroom. Later, nerdy debutante aesthetics were twisted into Martens’ world: twinsets in knit jacquard checks, massive flocked tulle skirts that only vaguely gestured toward traditional couture. Similarly irreverent were the full coats and trapeze dresses, their jacquard prints blurring in and out of reality like a VHS tape that had been overplayed one too many times.

But the real star? The bumsters, obviously—sent out in the final looks, provocatively topped with two-dimensional shirt fronts that did nothing to distract from the main event. The rest was just as disruptive: acid-tone ruffled knits, boiled leather jackets left to pucker and crumple in ways that made their flaws their point, shrink-wrapped denim so plasticky it looked vacuum-sealed. A black leather quilted jacket, stitched through with blood-red thread, felt like a final wink to Martens’ sherry-quaffing aristocratic fever dream.

Maybe it’s the fact that Martens has had a rare moment to focus—his usual double-duty schedule temporarily on pause—but this collection was, by far, his most charged, chaotic, and electric Diesel outing yet. A delirious cocktail of innovation, irreverence, and outright insanity.