Diesel's hedonistic party opens the shows

The world is falling apart, violence is rampant, obscurantism is rampant while popular culture, in the mainstream at least, takes giant leaps backwards, and yet fashion continues undaunted, as it should, its hyper-productive cycle, now made up primarily, on the catwalk, of image production and entertainment - the clothes you then find in the shop are something else.

As an understandable reaction, designers at the moment seem to be obsessed with the idea of joy, of celebration: bursts of hedonism that nevertheless have something unhealthy about them, as if they want to numb themselves in order to escape from reality. Impossible to argue with that. Milan Fashion Week opens with Diesel.

"It's like when, the day after a party, you wake up in the bed of you don't know who in a hotel room you really don't remember," says Glenn Martens sardonically, creative director of the brand, the spearhead and ram-head - for transversal and transgenerational penetration capacity - of Renzo Rosso's Otb Group.

The fashion show takes place around a sensational accumulation of objects and sets from the Diesel warehouses, a paraphernalia of forty-eight years (1978 is the year of its foundation) of shop windows, campaigns, fittings, while the clothes are all a twisting, a flaking, a liquefaction: sweaters boiled with sweat, little dresses made of wrapping paper, jeans and tops in which one has really enjoyed the evening, and then bodies dripping with glitter and sensuality. The vision is intoxicating, but paradoxically artificial: the party is ultimately pure staging.