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

Diesel had spent decades making imperfect, distressed denim its product truth, but its advertising had drifted from that idea. As social feeds filled with retouched perfection, the brand appointed Publicis Italia and needed a global statement that owned imperfection rather than hiding it.

Reverse the industry's reflex: cast real 'flawed' people instead of retouching them, and argue that flawless is forgettable — flaws make you stand out.

Publicis Italia's first Diesel work was a film directed by François Rousselet with street-cast people — freckles, scars, braces, unibrows — living loudly to Edith Piaf's 'Non, je ne regrette rien', plus print shot by Tom Sloan. It launched at a Beijing event with popstar Chris Lee and a capsule collection, and Formichetti's casting approach was 'own your flaws instead of Facetune-ing them out'.

The film became the brand's manifesto of the season, covered across advertising and fashion press from Adweek to i-D, and anchored Diesel's repositioning around imperfection; Formichetti's casting of unusual faces, many of them street-cast locals in Ukraine, became the story itself rather than the clothes.

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.

It inverted the beauty industry's default — retouching flaws away — into its opposite, making the campaign instantly recognisable.

The idea came from the brand's own product truth: Diesel literally sold flawed denim, so celebrating imperfect people felt inevitable rather than borrowed.

Casting real, street-found faces made the message visible in the execution itself; no claim needed explaining.

The contrarian framing — 'flawless is forgettable' — gave the press and audience a quotable idea that travelled beyond the film.

A brand's oldest product truth can become its freshest idea: Diesel turned decades of distressed denim into a statement about people — campaigns land hardest when the product believed it all along.

Go With The Flaw became a reference point for Diesel's contrarian brand voice and for campaigns that cast 'unconventional' beauty as the message rather than the backdrop. The Beijing launch and Chris Lee capsule showed Diesel taking the idea to the Chinese market directly, and Formichetti's casting approach drew attention from fashion and advertising press alike. Diesel kept returning to the imperfection theme in later seasons, and the campaign stands as the moment the brand turned its distressed-denim heritage into a philosophy about people.