Diesel’s creative director, Glenn Martens, is obsessed with objects. His FW26 show featured 50,000 pieces of memorabilia from the brand’s shows, parties, window displays, events, and offices. And his show invites are often crafted using Murano glass from the brand’s native Veneto region, fashioned into butt plugs or bananas. Now, the brand is adding another special object to the mix — a fragrance bottle designed to look like a pierced-open orchid for its new women’s scent, Only Desire, launching this month globally online and in Diesel stores.
“Diesel is a $1 billion — more or less — business in fashion. This means that the potential for fragrance is high and we want to capture it,” Sandrine Groslier, global president of luxe fragrances brands at L’Oréal Group, tells Vogue Business exclusively. “We hope that this fragrance will have a broad appeal and it will speak to many women.”
At L’Oréal Group, fragrance continues to boom. In its Q1 fiscal 2026 results, the company’s Luxe arm, made up of luxury skincare, makeup, and fragrance brands, posted 5.6% growth on a like-for-like basis. The group noted that “fragrances remained the standout growth engine.”
And there’s still growth potential. According to Euromonitor, the fragrance category is on track to grow 8.1% to $94 billion by 2027 despite fatigue or oversaturation.
It has been 15 years since Diesel launched a mass women’s fragrance with Loverdose in 2011, which went on to have three different iterations without sustaining its buzz thereafter. But with a helping hand from its licensee, L’Oréal Group, the brand wants to tap the potential of the growing category. The brand’s former women’s fragrances, such as Loverdose, D, and Fuel For Life, are still stocked on Diesel’s website, but across the wider business, they have lost momentum.
Since 1978, when Rosso founded Diesel, the brand ethos has been to appeal to a broader consumer with an accessible price point. In the ’90s and 2000s, the brand entered the premium market with its denim offering, but by the 2010s, Diesel had lost its luster, and women’s fragrances were waning.
Since Martens took the reins at Diesel in 2020, the focus has been on what he calls “alternative luxury”, with a strong premium positioning in the market and price points that don’t exceed £3,000. Only Desire will be priced at €75 for a 30ml bottle — strategically set to broaden appeal as the brand reinvigorates its fragrance business. “What we see today is that fragrances below €100 are really the ones growing the fastest,” says Groslier.
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