Diesel Uses 15 Tons of Denim Scraps to Create Milan Fashion Week Runway

Models walked on a carpet of discarded fabric amid trees of denim at Diesel’s Spring Summer 2025 collection at Milan fashion week.

The Italian fashion brand used 14,800 kilograms of denim waste to create a runway for its show. This huge pile of scraps is going to be repurposed to become insulation or upcycled denim rolls. Dezeen adds: “The collection itself featured coats and jeans made out of leftover spools of denim thread.”

There is beauty in waste, in what is distressed and destroyed. It’s in the circularity of denim waste, and into the distressing that we build into the collection. This is the disruption of Diesel: we are pushing for circularity in our production as hard as we push the elevation of design,” said Glenn Martens, the brand’s creative director told Hypebeast.

The show highlights how some within the fashion industry are striving for sustainability. Some luxury brands are incorporating fabrics made from recycled materials, including discarded fishing nets whilst others are selling their deadstock fabric – the fabric that us left over after a collection. 

According to Earth.org, 1. 92 million tonnes of textiles waste is produced every year. The environmental organisation explains: “Of the 100 billion garments produced each year, 92 million tonnes end up in landfills. To put things in perspective, this means that the equivalent of a rubbish truck full of clothes ends up on landfill sites every second.”