Diesel's 'Go With The Flaw' makes imperfection the point: flawless is forgettable

While every social feed chased #flawless — perfect holidays, perfect pictures, perfect lives — Diesel declared conformity itself the enemy. 'Go With The Flaw', the brand's global autumn/winter 2017 campaign from Publicis Italia, argued the opposite of the industry's reflex: be unordinary, because flawless is forgettable.

The idea grew straight out of Diesel's product history: founder Renzo Rosso made his first jeans by hand at fifteen, 'of course they weren't perfect', and the brand built four decades on flawed, distressed denim. So instead of a flawless model shoot, creative director Nicola Formichetti cast people with freckles, scars, braces and unibrows — many of them street-cast locals during a shoot in Ukraine — and had the film's characters live loudly to Edith Piaf's 'Non, je ne regrette rien'.

The film, directed by François Rousselet and produced by Division Paris, was the campaign's cornerstone: sweaty bodies, unfinished roads, roughed-up cars, and people who flaunt what the beauty industry would retouch. Print and billboard imagery by Tom Sloan carried the same idea, and the campaign launched on 6 September 2017 at an event in Beijing with Chinese popstar Chris Lee, including a limited capsule collection.

Formichetti described the intent as 'looking at your own flaws, and instead of Facetune-ing it out, you own it'. The campaign reset Diesel's social presence around the idea — the brand wiped its Instagram feed for a 'Day Zero' — and turned the flaw into the brand's most distinctive talking point of the year.