Diesel’s Fashion Week Parties Don’t Play By The Rules

If putting Diesel’s new campaign on sites and apps like Tinder and Pornhub is any indication, artistic director Nicola Formichetti does not play by the rules. He made that abundantly clear on Saturday with the opening of the store’s new Madison Avenue flagship, which he designed to look “smaller, more intimate, where people can talk to people,” but where it was impossible to actually, you know, talk to people. The store was packed to the brim, barely leaving any room for the likes of Naomi Campbell, Adrien Brody, Coco Rocha, Travis Scott, and campaign star Joe Jonas.

“Normally we have these big blockbuster stores, like on Fifth Avenue, and it felt very old to me to go to big stores like that. So I wanted to downsize everything,” Formichetti said. Whether or not the brick and mortar store will bring business, the campaign placement definitely seems to be doing its job: Since putting the ads on Pornhub, clickthrough rates and sales have been through the roof. “Who knew!” he said, smirking.

As for how Jonas feels about the, shall we say, innovative campaign featuring his likeness paired with emojis? “It’s very sexy,” he said. “And there’s shots that we couldn’t put on magazines, and it does attract a sexy, horny crowd.” One of the members of his new pop outfit, DNCE, agreed: “Pornhub’s gotten me through a lot of hard times,” he deadpanned.

Sporting a head of newly red hair, Jonas performed with his band at the after party at a cavernous private residence known as Academy Mansion in the Upper East Side. So did Scott, Virgil Abloh, Mia Moretti and Margot and Lady Gaga favorite Brian Newman, who took over a red-curtained, black-and-white-floored room straight out of Twin Peaks, where a woman with green-painted skin beckoned guests into a bathroom with a rainbow fluorescent bathtub.

The party spilled over two neon-lit floors and a courtyard, but it wouldn’t be fashion week if there wasn’t a room filled with shirtless, chiseled men, too: this evening’s were caressing older women in a wood-paneled room that only served vodka.

The campaign hardly forgotten, emojis were everywhere. Missing, though, was Jonas’s favorite: “The smirky smiley face,” he said, with a half-hearted attempt to recreate it. Eventually, he gave up, conceding: “I can’t really do it as good as the emoji, though.”