The Italian Fashion Brand Creating the Best-Dressed Living Spaces

When personal style and personal space combine, environments come alive. Case in point: the effortlessly cool, grit-sophisticate interiors informed by Diesel Living, a line of objects launched in 2008 by 40-year-old fashion company Diesel. By forging partnerships with fellow Italian entities including Moroso, Foscarini, Scavolini, Seletti, Berti, and others, the brand produces handsome creations that can be mixed, matched, or seamlessly folded into an existing environment. From cyberpunk tableware to rock ’n’ roll lamps to soulful ceramic tiles, each piece has irrefutable flair. Surface talked to Diesel’s head of global PR, Elena Piccinni, about the vision behind its fast-growing Living line, and its plans to expand into hospitality.

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How did Diesel Living emerge from Diesel?
Diesel Living was conceptualized by an internal creative team at our headquarters in Breganze, Italy. [The idea was to] clearly translate the brand’s lifestyle and attitude into the design world. It was initially launched as an assortment of textiles, which evolved organically from the Diesel fashion experience. The home collection continued to grow as we established partnerships with leading players in each segment of the interior design field. The whole collection is an ideal combination of Diesel’s style with the industry know-how and top quality design capabilities of our partners.

What’s the driving force behind the objects Diesel Living creates?
The Diesel landscape blends industrial style and a dark, adrenalized rock ’n’ roll spirit with the bright-toned, mischievous glee of pop. It’s a contemporary brand with vintage spirit. Textures and surfaces hold surprises—and this is where we want to innovate. Diesel Living’s objects communicate the company’s spirit with attitudes that are applied or suggested. Our willingness to say something in the design world fuels our desire to create, experiment, and bring people and ideas together.

What does good design mean for Diesel Living?
Good design is making the right decisions. It’s achieving the perfect mix of all the ingredients that make up our brand: the fun and passion we have when designing with our partners, the development of excellent materials, and the pursuit of the highest quality through research and innovation. It’s striving to keep everything Made in Italy, so we bring work to local people and waste as little as possible. It’s also creating open lines of communication, listening, and blending different points of view to enrich the process and the result.

What projects do you currently have in the works?
We are working on a few projects in the hospitality realm, and hope to share news on that front soon. In the meantime, because our collection has grown so much, we’ve decided to pause our pursuit of new collaborations and focus on existing partnerships, fostering them further. It’s amazing how we have succeeded in gathering so many different companies under the same roof. We are always grateful to our partners who believed in the project, and we’re really excited about the future.