In its later years, Diesel had lost its edge and was trying to fit in. The rebel started to mimic other premium fashion brands in communication, pricing and packaging but without the right credentials to back it up. As a consequence, Diesel disappeared like any other bland, boring fashion brand.

After years of customer love, Diesel’s channels now started to be flooded with hate.

“Diesel is dead.” “Diesel isn’t cool anymore.” “Diesel is selling overpriced shit that looks like trash and is tearing apart at the seams.”

Real comments by real people. Suddenly it was cool to complain about how uncool Diesel was. And in an industry that lives off its status and coolness to survive, this meant certain death.

But it’s fine, everybody gets it. And just like everyone else, we could’ve just hidden it, ignored it, pretended it’s not there and carried on.

Right?

Nah

At one point or another, we have all been victims of trolls, cyber bullies and online haters. But, when you expose online hate with irony and light-heartedness, you disarm that online hate. It loses its ability to cause harm. Our idea was to turn Diesel’s latest collection into a tool for doing just that: exposing, mocking and ultimately disarming online hate. It’s an idea we call Hate Couture. Each item in the Hate Couture collection is not just a cool piece of Diesel fashion, it’s an opportunity to proudly expose and wear the online hate you have received. And it’s a reminder that the more hate you wear, the less you care.

We wanted to go against online hate and deal with this the Diesel way.

While other brands were following the codes of the category, Diesel had always been delivering disruptive originality. This brand wasn’t a rebel just for the sake of it, it had always inspired people to take the alternative road to successful living.

“Online hate is inevitable, but caring about it is optional.”

When we’re ashamed of our flaws and the criticism we receive about them, we try to hide it. But by hiding it we give hate more power. Instead, we decided to expose it. Show hate for what it was.

The truth is, the more you expose the hate you get, treating it with irony and irreverence, the less harm it will cause you.

To launch Hate Couture we partnered with nine celebrities and influencers. We created unique Diesel items inspired by the online hate that each of our partners has received; and we introduced this collection with online content that joyfully and ironically celebrates these hateful comments. To really bring the joy, celebration and irony to life, we re-orchestrated the famous Marilyn Monroe song “I Wanna Be Loved By You”, introducing Caribbean flavours to the already joyful song even more upbeat. The performances in our film were choreographed to this new track. And then, our film was seeded online by the celebrities and influencers that star in it. Finally, we even released our new version the song on Spotify.

We sold 35% of the entire collection in the first 4 days of the campaign, online and in-store. In total our campaign reached more than 400 million people, and the story was covered by The New Yorker, WWD, VOGUE, I-D Vice, People Magazine, just to name a few. Our film was viewed more than 40 million times only in the first 10 days of the campaign. We sparked hundreds of thousands of debates and discussions around the topic of online hate. And, ultimately we initiated the successful disempowerment of countless hateful comments on social media.