Store Diesel

Product range: mostly jeans for men, women, and kids: all in all the brand releases over 500 styles every season. Jeans by Diesel are less austere than Calvin Kleins and unlike with Levi's are not loaded with vintage connotations. Apparel by Diesel is a range of deliberately brutal looking T-shirts, denim and leather jackets, dresses, and even denim hoodies, not to mention jeans proper. Add to this a range of staple basics: unassuming white and black T-shirts. Occasionally, more more ingeniously designed items like see-through dresses or pink maternity wear jeans also make it to Diesel stores.

Originality: Diesel have succeeded in building a strong personality as a brand of brutal hedonism and off-the-wall humor. So numerous references to grunge and biker cultures come as no surprise: leather jackets, T-shirts and sweaters with irezumi-inspired prints, knitwear with stripes of cutout patterns, and hardwearing dress shoes. The palette is dominated by blacks, whites, and grays. Diesel Living homeware products convey the same ruthless message: cutlery sets crafted in the form of a wrench kit, hyper-realistic imitations of traffic cones, and DIY toolboxes.

Relevance: It would be a stretch to call Diesel a fashion-forward brand. Rest assured some of the advanced trends have also been adopted: think for example of blending several denim fabric types in the composition of a single piece. However, the company mostly caters to the tastes and preferences of majority consumers and beats the competition with a wide selection of items.

Pricing policy: Jeans are priced from €155 to 490, dresses cost on average €250, sweatshirts and shirts are €170, jumpers are €200.

Corporate history highlights: The Diesel company was founded in 1978 by Renzo Rosso and Adriano Goldschmied in a small town of Molvena, Italy. Wilbert Das has been at the helm of Diesel as Creative Director since 1993. The company doesn't operate its own production facilities and makes use of outsourcing bases in India and elsewhere. Diesel made its first foray into the markets of post communist East-European countries back in the 1990s, but few of the stores have survived to this day the economic recessions that followed (most notably in Russia).

.